My phone is, for lack of a better word, dumb. It’s not the most apt; its app-less, in fact.
It was a year and a half ago when my Verizon LG VX5400 first pathetically flipped its way into my personal and private life. My original phone was an EnV2, which I have long since theorized to be the prime culprit in the phenomenon that came to be known as “butt-dialing.” One way or another, it accidentally flew headlong into a concrete dorm room wall two springs ago. Envy, I think not.
The day I got my current phone was a memorable enough endeavor. I had an emergency that evening that required I keep my phone attached at the hip (imagine that), and it’s hard to do that when your phone is lying in pieces on your dorm room floor. So, the kindly sales rep at Verizon Wireless went out to his car, jimmied into a glove compartment and handed me what I thought would be a mixtape, but turned out to be a free phone.
But here’s the truth: I’m more than satisfied with my dumbphone, and have been since that day a year and a half ago. I don’t know if it’s necessarily that I love my phone or that I just don’t like yours.
Call me old fashioned, but I don’t like any of my technology to be a Jack of too many trades. I like my CD player (that I wish I still had) to play my music and to play it well. I like my vacuum to clean my carpet. No one gizmo dominates my lifestyle completely; they all do separately and equally.
Come to think of it, of all the gadgets we had to evolve into the modern-day equivalent of a Swiss army knife, why phones? Why not a printer or a leaf blower or a coffee maker? Admittedly, introverts and social loners such as myself are not equipped for the robo-phones of today, but I’d be all for the Swiss army coffee maker concept. I like coffee, at least a lot more than I like phones, anyway.
And let’s face it, these, “smart phones” — are they even phones anymore? I mean when you really look at the entirety of what these phones do, the phone-like activity is tremendously outnumbered by all the emailing, the apps, the quail-hunting or whatever it is you kids do today.
Here’s my point. I know that my phone may be a piece of crap, but it is a phone. It looks like a phone, it smells like a phone, it calls people like a phone — the best that it can, anyway.
But last week I considered enrolling in one particular class, a class I was excited about, that required a smart phone.
I know, right?
Granted, it was an audio production class and it made perfect sense for the subject matter and course material, but it was still a startling moment to me: For the first time, I looked at my phone and wondered if it would be enough to get me by anymore.
So, should I advance? Or maybe I could just revert backwardly, learn how to make smoke signals or walk around with a can and some yarn all day. There is probably an app for that on your smart phone anyway.
My mother reminds me of my eligibility for upgrades constantly, among other little reminders that make me want to throw my dumbphone into some more drywall (which I can do with this phone).
But honestly, I think I’m just not a prime smarter-phone-than-mine customer. I can’t handle the stress of multitasking; I can barely walk and chew gum at the same time. I drop things exceptionally often. I’ve lost every respective seasonal jacket, every season for 20 years running. Me and my dumbphone, we’re meant to be.
I like falling off the face of the earth entirely too much to have a personal tracking device. Every blip, beep and bop on a phone would suck me right in, right into the Facebooking, the emailing, the Internet-ing. When my phone dies, I don’t mourn its death, and believe me, it dies often.
Shouldn’t I be ashamed, just a little? The first culturally accepted technological step forward in my adult life and I’m already using old-man language like gizmo, gadget and conflabbing.
I shan’t give up on the thought of purchasing an iPhone someday; I’m probably just in denial. I’ve always been the last person to get the joke, to know who got married in Taiwan last week, to buy the Crocs. (OK, my Dad bought those, but I do wear them begrudgingly, I admit).
So for now, while my inability to remain caught up with any of the Joneses remains intact, I’ll have to keep waking up to alarmingly dated-sounding alarm ringtones, doing my best at texting the way I talk and working up that old thumb strength.
Weighing the cost of being a student
