Things were down with blogspot this morning, but they seem to be straightened out a little now.

I still have the same cell phone I’ve had two years ago, maybe three. When the Motorola V-60 Ts first came out, Anthony and I were all over them. They had the newest features for the time. Within days, I had cracked the holster by sitting in a chair that was a little too narrow for me plus the phone. Not long after that, I cracked the antenna on the phone in a similar fashion. It was in my pocket, and the antenna somehow managed to snag, snapping it off. The replacement fell to the same thing just a few days later. When I went back to Cingular, I made sure I got a phone that had an internal antenna. The reception was not quite as good, but no more snapping antennas. The new phone had the coolest feature yet. It has an internal radio that picks up AM and FM broadcasts. If I still had the earpiece, I’m sure it would still work to this day. My phone is a workhorse phone. The charger-battery interface is no-nonsense, unlike many phones of today. It never comes unplugged when I plug it in, and if it isn’t making a connection then the problem is far more likely to be the plug not going into the cigarette lighter hole than the connection with the phone. My wife’s phone, and most any Motorola or Ericcson phone suffers from connections that tend to work SOME of the time. Lately I’ve suffered criticism that my phone looks like it’s been through the war, and having seen phones that have indeed been through the war, I can tell you that mine actually looks a good deal worse. I’ve dropped it on pavement and gravel uncountable times. I’ve thrown it in loose pockets with my keys too many ties. The face is scratched, the body is scratched, it has a missing button (one I never use), and occasionally the SIM card doesn’t seat just right. Still, I like my phone, because my phone is not a toy. It doesn’t take video or pictures, I don’t get V-cast, the ring tones sound like crap, and it won’t play mp3s. It does two things very well though. It stores the numbers for almost everyone I know, and it calls those folks when I ask it to. The main reason I have never gotten a new one is that I am still on ITA’s phone plan, and trading it out would be a nightmare of scheduling with Anthony to come and sign a mountain of papers. Not that I haven’t thought of just buying a new one and switching the SIM card, but it’s a pretty low priority.

All that being said, I still haven’t gotten used to the idea of using a cell phone for more than short periods of time. I probably have more minutes at my disposal than most people I know, but I rarely use more than a couple hundred a month. I still think of my phone as for emergency use and short conversations only. My wife calls me almost every day when she gets off work, and makes small talk. I’m trying to be pleasant and cordial, lest she think I’m being short with her, while inside my mind is screaming that the conversation is wasting a huge number of minutes. Of course the minute restrictions are not what they used to be. There were phone packages, and I believe my mother had one, that allowed thirty minutes a month free before you started being charged some outlandish rate, like fifty cents a minute, maybe more. When I worked at the theatre at Lexington Mall I saw a woman sit on our steps talking on her cell phone as if she had all the minutes in the world, while a pay phone was right beside her. I thought she was being so wasteful. That was in 1995, not so terribly long ago, but look how the world has changed. I remember that same year watching Days of Our Lives with Tina (because she made me) and seeing all the characters pull cell phones out of their pockets to make phone calls while they were at home. I thought it was so unrealistic. I didn’t realize that I might be doing the same thing within just a few years. I guess I’ve gotten my first small taste of Future Shock. If I seem short on the phone, please forgive me, it’s just my outdated cluture.