December 25, 2003

• A Semi-guilty Confession

  
  

  I am a vulgar old man, and a Luddite to boot.  I hate new-fangled stuff like computers and cars with automatic transmissions and laser surgery and velcro and word processors–hey, a manual typewriter was good enough for Mark Twain and it was good enough for me.  For years, I was the only PR guy in state government with a manual, everyone else had a fancy IBM Selectric. But I digress.  I must confess–I own a cell phone.

  
  

  It didn’t come easy.  This summer, when I worked in town fifty miles away, I was spending an  obscene amount of money on pay phones to call my sweety, so a cell phone made sense.  So I go to Wal-mart and talk to the cell phone lady.  “I want one that just makes calls,” I said.  “I don’t want one that will take pictures or play games or do my income taxes.  I just want a phone.”  The closest thing to that was the no-frills Nokia, fifty bucks with a fifty buck rebate–pretty much free, in other words.  I could live with that, I figured.

  
  

  “I’ll take one,” I says.

  
  

  “They’re out of stock,” she says.

  
  

  A few months later, desperate, I’m back.  The free one is still out of stock, so I shell out fifty clams (no rebate on this puppy) for a Motorola.  It had voice-activated dialing, which I thought was pretty cool.  Thing is, you had to first program the numbers into the built-in address book.  I never did get the hang of that, so I never used that feature.

  
  

  It also has something called text messaging, which I assume is something sort of like email.  Email I can cope with.  Never figured out the ins and outs of that one, either, though so I never used that feature.  It also has a  built-in calculator, and of course, I never bothered to figure out how to use that, since I always have a pen handy and can usually find a piece of paper if I need to do some math.

  
  

  It doesn’t take pictures, thank God, but it does have three games built in: poker, falling numbers, and blackjack.  I vowed on principle long sgo to never play poker with anyone smarter than I am, so the poker was out. The falling numbers thng requires way more hand-eye coordination that I can muster up, so that’s out.  There have been times, however, when I have been so bored that I did play blackjack with my phone.  I lost every time.

  
  

  One special whiz-bang I did use was the voice recording.  This I can deal with–push a button and talk.  I CAN push a button, and I CAN talk.  Boy, can I talk.  Ask my wife. I haven’t used this feature for a few months–last time was this summer, when I wanted to document an especially sharp deal I was making and didn’t want the other guy to be able to weasel out of it.  But it’s nice to know it’s there.

  
  

  I guess the freedom of the thing was one factor that finally sold me, not having to search all around for a pay phone and all.  One of the first times I used it, I called my sweety at home when I was in the men’s room of the Wasilla Historical Museum.  The transmission was great, she said she could hear every tinkle and splash at my end.  I loved  it. Besides being vulgar, I’m a whimsical kind of guy and the notion of standing there, my hi-tech phone in one hand and my lo-tech willy in the other just tickled me immensely.  Hey, when you don’t drink or smoke  or gamble, you get your jollies wherever you can find them.

  
  

  Plus I liked the idea of being able to call my relatives Outside.  They live about 4,000 miles away, and I got unlimited weekend long-distance minutes.  Quite a deal, I thought.  But the phone company  had the last laugh–when I got home, out here in God’s country, Alaska, I discovered we live in a no-coverage area.  Shucks, I can’t even call the local general store, much less the East Coast. 

  
  

  But I am still glad I got it, especially on those long drives to town on snowy nights when the car is acting up.  And best of all, today I  saw an ad for the same phone–or one that looks just like it and has the same features–on sale at Fred Meyer’s–for almost twice what I paid at Wal-mart.

  • 7:05 pm
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