Day: May 4, 2011

I remember coming home one day as a teenager to a deafening roar inside the house. Puzzled, I walked into the kitchen to find my mother, basically nonplussed by the noise. I looked at her quizzically.

“Your father has a new toy,” she said.

For some reason, Dad decided we needed surround sound for our television. Mind you, this was the mid-1980s so the technology was fairly primitive. Dad didn’t care and felt he needed to turn the sound all the way up to make the proper adjustments to the system.

Part of me found his ideas pretty kooky, but I have learned over the past 30 years or so that he had the exact right idea when it came to gadgets. You can never have enough of them.

Even with this mindset, I have resisted the siren song of one particularly fun item – a fancy cell phone. Well, that is until a few weeks ago.

I finally upgraded from my pre-paid, no-frills phone to a low-cost monthly plan which includes a touch-screen phone. I didn’t go for the full-on smartphone, but I have enough fun things to play with now.

That’s the problem.