Cell

I'm not a big cell phone guy. I have the cheapest phone the T-Mobile store had the day I broke down and bought one. It was August, 2006, and I'd just had a harrowing experience when Thing One took the bus when I was supposed to pick her up.

Anyway, I buy 1000 minutes at a shot because it's the cheapest per-minute rate and the minutes don't expire for a year. If I buy fewer minutes, they not only cost more per minute, but they go bad in a month if I don't use them. And I often don't use them.

1000 minutes lasts me about ten months on average, I think. Perfecto. No minutes go bad, but I'm not overbuying by a wide margin. It's a small thing, but balance is something that doesn't come easily to me, and I gloat when I achieve it.

In fact, I realized how not a cell phone guy I am on a date I recently went on. It was no big deal, just a get acquainted sort of thing, one of those first-and-only sorts of dates. But the chick wanted me to text her as a primary mode of communication.

And before you tell me I should be playing with kids my own age, this chick was practically my age...okay, she was nine years younger than me, but that's six years older than my last first-and-only date.

But I'd never texted. This, I know, is not a good starting point: the middle-aged divorced Dad who cant' see why he'd want to hit the same key four times to get one stupid character, and a twenty-something who can do 40 words a minute with just her thumb on nine keys.

Our common ground disintegrated faster, though, after I'd texted enough to get to the bar with her. She proceeded to text while I was trying to talk to her on our date. That and the fact that she hates football and loves NASCAR, well, I mean really.

Plus, every time a book or movie or even a TV show came up on my side of the conversation, she'd never heard of it. I don't mean obscure stuff. I mean the woman hadn't seen Office Space or Fight Club. Those two movies aren't prerequisites to date me, I'm just saying that's two examples among two hour's worth, and at one point I said, 'Maybe you'd be able to engage the culture you live in a little more if you didn't spend so much time thumb-typing.'

'Sorry,' she said. Then she sent another text message.

But I didn't start this post to talk about my abortive date.



I started this post to tell you about a cell phone so cool even I want it. And I'm not entirely sure I know why. Obviously, I'm not a heavy cell phone user. And obviously I waste plenty of time on the internet (this dork is closing on 1100 blog posts) with just regular computers. Plus, I'm a hi-fi snob and refuse to listen to the MP3 format because I don't believe you can throw out that much information and have the music sound right. An iPod might be okay for audiobooks and talk radio, but I have a car stereo that fills that niche. Plus, I hate earbuds.

Still, if I was going to spend a bunch of money on a cell phone, this'd be the one. Not that I'm going to.

One of the little conversational tidbits from the date was when she explained how she and her ex boyfriend were both on the play they'd got before they became 'ex,' and that they had unlimited text and talk minutes because they got such a deal. And I did the math in my head on what I spend on cell phone minutes and asked, 'Is it ten bucks a month or less?'

'Ah, no.' She and her former beau spend as much in a month as I do in ten on this particular item. Again, a small thing, but someone who fails frugality tests as easily as I do needs to find his kudos where he can.

I loves my consumer electronics, but I doubt I'd love this once the bill came again and again.