Cell Phone Replacement

It’s time to get a new cell phone. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the Blackberry that I’ve carried for two years, but the honeymoon is over and it’s time to ship it off to a box in the technology closet, an elephant’s graveyard in my office where unattached chargers, dead or dying laptops and obsolete MP3 players go to languish and die.

I have a hard time shipping those things off to the thrift store because I think that there’s still useful life in them. What if I lose my new phone, or my iPod won’t sink?\

Besides, good money was paid for those and they still work.  Why should they be simply thrown out??

The reality, of course, is that they go into the closet.  This is the same closet that holds the box where all the black, unmarked chargers with wall warts migrate, interbreeding to increase their mass and procreate little indeterminate electronic parts that might go to any one of three or four different appliances but which will never be matched up to anything specific again.

Until, of course, the week after they are thrown out, at which point their use will immediately become apparent, as will the fact that they can no longer be procured from the manufacturer.

Part of the need to save these gizmos comes from the fact that I remember how much they cost when they were new. Like the $200 electronic “Pong” game that dad got us for Christmas about 1977, or the subsequent Atari, the fun may be gone after a while but nothing which cost that much is going to be thrown away unless it’s absolutely broken and cannot be fixed or repaired.

Adjust for 1977 dollars, and you’ll understand why that could be an issue.

Cell phones, for the most part, are disposable. Sure, you may plop down some portion of the purchase price, but if you’ll sign up for another couple of years they will happily give you a new gizmo fix to feed your habit.

So why keep the old ones?

A couple are “backups”. When my current Blackberry quit functioning a couple of months after I got it, Verizon was happy to replace it. I just sent the old one back to them via Fed Ex and in a few short days my new one arrived.

Now, we’ve seen on television the extent that crack addicts will go to keep a supply of drugs for their habits. Is it realistic to think that an electronic junkie is going to go any length of time on the PROMISE that a telephone company is going to send a new phone? Who believes anything that the phone company or the cable company tells them, anyhow?? Besides, since we cut the land line, this is the primary form of communication.

It ain’t happenin’. The old Palm came out of the box and was pressed back into service.

Occasionally one of the kids will mangle / lose their phone, so having a couple of spares even makes more sense.

The reality, though, is that the old one is being kept in case I’m not bright enough to learn how to use the new one. While the newest features touted by the advertisers are enticing – after all, the new phone is going to organize my life, provide constant internet access and take photographs to record even the most mundane of activities to share with my friends via Facebook – but the problem is I still have to figure out how to use the darned thing to make it work.

Lots of these things are no longer intuitive for me. I have to study and practice them out methodically over time. Sometimes this takes a couple of years, and then, of course, it’s time for a new phone.

The problem is compounded by the fact that devices now re-arrange themselves to make things more “useful,” thus slowing my learning curve even more. I may not always do things in the most efficient manner because that’s the way I’ve learned to do them. Like typing on a QWERTY keyboard, my fingers know what to do without a lot of intention on my part. You go changing things around, and I’m going to have to learn all over again.

Lately, my decisions regarding cell phones haven’t been based as much on the applications and neat things it will do, but rather on how big the type will get and how easy it is to read the buttons. Blackberry is a dismal failure on the latter – multi-function buttons, labeled in black against a silver background means that anything viewed without my reading glasses is but a miniscule blur.

Verizon, my carrier, has introduced the new Droid just this week – flat screen, no visible keyboard unless you slide it open and then it’s got the full thing in the order I’m used to, and it looks to have nice big print so I can actually see what the heck is going on.

Of course, I’ll have to keep the old one just in case.