My Phone May Be Too Good for Me

This is probably going to excite most of you far (FAR) less than it excites me. But today I GOT A SMARTPHONE.

Oh my God oh my God oh my God.

Sorry, but it really is like that.

I've never had a smartphone. The phone I had was mildly retarded. It made calls and texted. It had a crappy little camera. It actually went online using, I believe, a 28.8 baud dial-up modem. Seriously.

I had no apps. I had no touch screen. What I had was a big red phone that weighed about a pound and lately had developed cell-phone Alzheimer's. It had taken to randomly turning itself off, refusing to receive texts, and only achieiving an Internet connection when it damn well felt like it.

It was the Grumpy Cat of phones, without being
remotely adorable about it.

But for all my phone's flaws, Precocious Daughter's phone was worse. We got her a basic cell phone two years ago so we could stay in touch when she was with friends or doing school activities. And for a while, that worked out OK. Until her phone - which apparently shared DNA with mine - up and decided it would no longer stay charged unless it was physically plugged into the wall.

Stay with me here: a cell - or mobile - phone that can't leave the house is to a certain extent defeating the purpose of the technology.

This would have been a distinct improvement.
Portable, and the child would have been humiliated.
Score.

Finally, our three-person family had four cell phones. Each of us had a phone, plus we had a "house" phone that mostly sat around lonely and then got sulky and dropped calls when we actually wanted to use it. Yeah, we basically had the sorriest, most dysfunctional collection of cell phones in America. Or maybe we all get the phones we deserve.

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, right.

So Beloved Spouse had been bugging me for some time to right all that was wrong with our cell phones. Today was the day. PDaughter and I were at the mall, and we walked past the T-Mobile kiosk, and instead of averting my eyes and pretending I really, really had to get to Charlotte Russe immediately as I usually do to avoid messing with this stuff, I stopped, took a deep breath, and said, "I need to change my plan."

God, I hate dealing with my plan. What a pain in the butt. I'd rather put hot pokers in my eyes than deal with my plan. In fact, I'd rather pay for an assemblage of underperforming, overpriced phones than deal with my plan, as demonstrated by the fact that I'd been doing just that for months.

But then...a miracle happened.

And I don't mean the miracle of
the Jesus Banana.

An awesome young man named Amir started digging in to our options. And when the dust settled, PDaughter and I got smartphones. We got more minutes, unlimited data, and unlimited texts. T-Mobile told us to keep the house line for free and gave us a free upgrade to replace the cranky phone. They cut the price of our mobile hotspot in half. And the overall cost of our plan went down.

I have no idea what just happened.

Me.

I have a smartphone. It's a...oh hell, I don't even know. It's shiny.

Yeah, that's it. It's an Optimus Prime.
I think it turns into a car or something.

I'm positive my smartphone is in fact smarter than I am. I haven't a clue what to do with it. I'm a little afraid of it. And now I have to actually figure out what an "app" is instead of pretending I know.

But it's soooo cool. I can't believe it wants to be my friend. I'm going to start playing with it and seeing what it can do once I work up the nerve. I'm going to Facebook and download and Skype and share and all that good shit.

Hey...I wonder if this thing makes calls, too?