I remember when I bought my first cell phone. Maria was pregnant with Bridget, and I was working in downtown Baltimore.
Just in case the kid decided to come at an inopportune time, she needed a way to get in touch with me. So I headed off to the mall and picked out something cool, but affordable.
I remember looking at all the available calling plans. My instincts told me to pick the cheapest one, but I harbored odd fantasies of getting calls day and night from friends I hadn’t heard from in ages just dying to catch up now that I had a cool new phone.
Yeah, that never happened. In fact in the almost eight years I have had a cell phone, I have learned that I hate talking on the phone whether it’s in my house or can fit in my pocket.
I took a drastic step this week and discontinued my monthly service for a pre-paid phone. For someone like me who just loves the newest and coolest technology, this hurts a little deep down inside.
The epiphany came when I looked at my bill a couple of months ago. I didn’t always do that because I just paid the balance in full without really looking at it in detail. I hardly ever had any additional charges so I didn’t need to be bothered.
Then I saw that I had almost 5,000 rollover minutes at my disposal. That’s not because I had such an awesome plan. I just only used the phone when I absolutely had to, which meant I never got close to my monthly allotment of minutes.
I could honestly talk on the phone for more than three days straight without paying any extra money, but the thought of that just made me cringe. Sending an e-mail was so much simpler.
These days, you can do that from your phone. I didn’t always take advantage of these special features, something that demonstrates how little I care about cell phones. I used to have one of those cool phones with a foldout keyboard, but I never sent all the text messages I said I would when I bought it.
I did have fun buying ringtones for about five minutes. Eventually, I realized that that since I hardly ever got incoming calls, I couldn’t justify changing the sound very often.
The only extra I ever really used a lot was the Tetris game which I downloaded one day. That game has gotten me through a lot of meetings and events I didn’t want to go to but had to for some reason or another.
I don’t know if I can get Tetris on the new phone I bought, which is so flimsy I am afraid my habit of dropping my phone might end up costing me all the money I am saving.
I guess that’s how they get you. They probably know the cheap people like me are also clumsy. I might just have to resort to writing letters if I can’t protect this thing.
