Phones Schmones

So, I've never been a big cell phone guy. I've never had the latest technology, and I'm usually at least one or two generations behind on whatever's current. But that's ok with me, I don't really text, and I don't like talking on the phone, so hey, who needs it. Right?

Well, even if you don't need to call people, occasionally people want to call you, and then when they find out you don't have a phone, suddenly you've terribly inconvenienced them. Now they have to write you an e-mail instead, or wait for you to get home to a landline and give them a call. Apparently it's sacrilege to exist sans-cellularity these days, which makes me the biggest heathen on the planet.

It's particularly a problem when you've got a handful of people you actually do want to talk to, but they all live at least a thousand miles apart from one another--six thousand, in the case of some far-flung individuals. Long distance plans are never the most convenient or affordable, and so you're faced with establishing regular communications via-internet (which no one seems to have time for these days, aside from trite updates on your facebook page) or just losing touch entirely.

I'm typically never on the cutting edge of anything. As a general rule, I despise trends and the latest fashions, hype, hubbub, and any type of hullabaloo, brouhaha, or rigmarole for popular etiquette's sake. I usually pick up on a thing well after it's gone through it's fad phase and has settled into standard societal usage.

This practise has three purposes: one, it's saves considerable money. Trends are, on average, expensive to pursue. If you want that thing that everyone else has, you gon' hafta pay, son. Secondly, by waiting you get the benefit of letting other people test out the newest technologies and make sure they're something enduring. Nothing's worse than investing hundreds of dollars into HD-DVD players and compatible hardware, to discover that's its obsolete and irrelevant before you've had a chance to even use it.

Thirdly, and least practically, it spares my dignity the affront of having to "go along" with everyone else. I'm not above resisting the crowd simply to be stubborn, and it's a position I'll maintain probably until they put me in a coffin. If they're still doing that when I die. They may be shooting people into space by then, creating some sort of eternal, cosmic-graveyard. I'll still probably hold off on the idea for a bit, cause you know, what about meteors? Or micro-singularities? "We're sorry m'am, your late husband is somewhere in the fourth dimension, we believe, his sarcophagus being inevitably plundered by roving bands of non-euclidean space pirates." Solid earth for me, folks.

So yeah. This started as a treatise on how I don't have a cell phone. But I seem to be prone to digression.

Back on track, towards the end of my stay in Canada I finally got a cell phone. It was the bottom of the barrel, basic phone, but I loved it. It had no flip screen or unfolding, magic panels or miraculous touch-screen. Just a slim, tiny, little phone that made hardly an impression in my jeans pocket. Which, is ideal. I hate being reminded I have things in my pockets.

Things were swell! Then I moved. And it didn't work. That was in September. I haven't had a phone since then.

And honestly? Haven't missed it.

Oh sure, other people have wished I had a phone, have berated me for my lack of communicability. But shucks to them! Phones here are ridiculously expensive. $70+ a month seems to be the going standard, if you want anything approaching current.

So I've decided to unlock my old Canadian phone (which barely saw any use, and is only a few months old, though I realise by most standards this makes it ancient). It hasn't proved easy! The unlocking code doesn't work, for some reason, and the service provider says they can't help. The manufacturer is in China, and my experience there has taught me it might as well have been crafted on Mars, for all the help I'm going to get.

So it looks like for now, I'm sending it to the cheapest unlocking specialist I can find. The T-Mobile man helpfully suggested I head on down to Mexico--south of the border, down under, into America's pants--and get it unlocked. I laughed, but he appeared quite serious, so I politely told him I would think about it. (I won't).