I remember when I bought my first cell phone. Maria was pregnant with Bridget, and I was working in downtown Baltimore.<\/p>\n
\tJust 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.<\/p>\n
\tI 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.<\/p>\n
\tYeah, 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.<\/p>\n
\tI 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.<\/p>\n
\tThe 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.<\/p>\n
\tThen 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.<\/p>\n
\tI 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.<\/p>\n
\tThese 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.<\/p>\n
\tI 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.<\/p>\n
\tThe 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.<\/p>\n
\tI 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.<\/p>\n
\tI 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","wpcat-3-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}