Nope. Just more white, mocking me. Good luck reading those text messages, sucker! I mean, it was Saturday night, so it's not like I was in high demand by any stretch, but there's a disturbing feeling about being off the grid. Much as white people need to be prepared by wearing their performance outerwear, you never know when someone's going to try and get ahold of you to tell you something totally awesome is happening, worth dropping whatever you're doing at the moment.
It's funny enough I'd be so concerned over a phone, anyway. The only reason I got a cell phone in the first place was because my parents wanted me to have that safety net once I had a car. I'd told myself I wasn't important enough that I really needed to be accessible by phone all the time. I had a dorm phone, I had my parents' phone, and if I wasn't near one of those and wasn't online somehow, then anyone who would call me was probably already with me. Eventually, I started talking with a girl or two who had an affinity for the phone over online communiqués, and so I realized that, being one who likes to talk in real life, I didn't mind talking on the phone, either. I still didn't need text-messaging, until I got involved on the McCain campaign and everyone was just texting in lieu of making phone calls. After racking up $50 or $60 in pay-by-the-text messages in a month, I added texting to my phone.
And so, here I was, balancing a pool cue in one hand, flipping my ailing LG VX5400 open and shut, hoping for a different answer each time. Actually, as timing goes, Saturday night isn't really a bad night for a phone to die. What had my mind racing was the question I've been trying not to answer for quite a few months.
Is it time for the smartphone yet?
I'm odd as far as nerds go. I have two computers in my room, a laptop in a case not too far away, and more computers in the garage than I've had girlfriends in my life. My license plate is a geek reference that's lost on everyone else. I speak in memes, I gawk at Apple notebooks in libraries and coffee shops. And yet, I can be a stubborn laggard when new tech-toys emerge. Part of it is thrift, and part of it is an inexplicable hipster-like tendency to not want to be the bandwagon-jumper. Maybe I don't want to be associated with failure, who knows?
And so the guy most people assume is a slave to his CrackBerry or iPhone is a nerd who sends and receives 800 texts a month off a phone with a numeric keypad, hammering the keys the prescribed number of times to get full sentences under that 160-character limit. With apologies to Chamillionaire, they see me textin', they hatin', T9-ing and trying to catch me writing QWERTY.
The last time I upgraded my phone through Verizon, it wasn't much of an upgrade. That was sort of by design. I can text plenty fast on a numeric keypad, so I don't need a phone with a keyboard. If I got a phone with a keyboard, I would have to get a BlackBerry or something requiring a data plan, something I didn't really think was worth the cost. And ever since I broke that first Palm IIIxe back in high school, I've been leery of trying to tote something with a good-sized screen in a pocket like that. My sister can stow her Voyager and my mom can stow her enV2 in their respective purses, but except in the J. Peterman catalog, purses just haven't caught on among men.
The other thing was, I keep feeling like I'm not important to need a BlackBerry. I've got this stigma about the things, that they're tools not for personal use, but for the businessperson who can't or doesn't want to break away from work. If I got one, I know I'd tie it to my work e-mail account. I'm always thinking about work already; I don't need to make it any easier. And yet, that's exactly what I'd do. I'm already doing it in other ways. Part of me feels it's expected, not by my company, but by the customers. It's the one e-mail that comes in after you've left the office for the weekend that makes you feel like you should have been checking e-mails all the while. I don't want a smartphone to turn me into one of those work zombies who never unplugs, but then, the device doesn't turn you, you turn yourself.
And so I can't help but think that my next phone has to be a smartphone. From a work standpoint, I could tether my e-mail to my smartphone, I could check drivers through Field Force Manager's Web portal, I could install Skype Mobile to keep in touch. From a personal standpoint, hell, it'd be cool to be permanently wired. Gmail and Wikipedia access at a moment's notice are worth a glance, for sure. I'd finally have an excuse to join Twitter, too, though that's hardly a motivating factor to buy a smartphone.
As it turned out, it was a non-question in the end. To my surprise, my phone was covered under warranty (I figured they sold insurance so they didn't have to provide warranty coverage), and so I walked out of the Verizon store with a new, identical phone sans the paint chip sustained when I dropped the phone on a stone walkway doing door-to-doors in Wolfeboro. (The bastards gave me back my old, worn battery cover, though.) I kept my contacts, not that I couldn't have recreated them, and I walked out without spending an extra dime.
And yet, as I sat in the car, I felt a little bummed out, because in a moment of weakness, I was warming to the smartphone. Not to the slave-to-work element of it, but just the coolness factor of having the world at my fingertips, like just about everyone else, none of whom are concerned over how important they are and whether they actually warrant having a BlackBerry or not. I'm still a little lukewarm on the whole thing, like even though my new phone still works just wonderfully, I'd consider upgrading to a BlackBerry or a Windows Mobile phone tomorrow.
At least this week, I'm hanging onto this old-school phone. But I can't help but wonder when I'm finally going to decide this is one upgrade I can't keep avoiding.
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