It is making me feel a bit nauseated, but I am multitasking. I am walking and typing ... make that typin and walking and trying to register the ever changong image on my iPhone,a view of rhe syreet in front of me that is provided courtesy of rhe iPhone app called typing and wdlking.

O.K., enough of that. The iPhone application I was trying is called Type n Walk; it’s supposed to make it easier to text while strolling by providing a visual, on the phone, of what is happening on the street a few feet ahead. I gave up after 10 minutes. I need only one reasonably sane looking person to gesticulate at me wildly for me to get the hint: I am a walking urban menace.

I can barely text and chew gum at the same time, much less text, walk, think and watch the street in front of me, even if that street is visible on the same small screen as my text. To Type n Walk west on 43rd Street felt not so much efficient as wildly incompetent, which is also how I feel typing and texting without the application. I feel fairly confident it would take less training to make me proficient in laparoscopic surgery than it would to make me feel safe walking and texting on the streets of New York.

Instead of yapping into the air about whatever medical form didn’t get filed or short sale didn’t happen, now people are tapping those same thoughts furiously into their phones, like mass Morse coders, all while moving at speed down the street. The new model of communication may be more private, but it’s certainly just as irritating, and surely not as safe (so far, unlike texting and driving, it remains legal). Mid-text, I looked up to see a businessman crossing 43rd Street on Madison Avenue nearly bump into a taxi that was farther west of the stoplight than it should have been. Naturally, the pedestrian’s thumbs were busy on his BlackBerry at the moment.