Let me tell ya about my cell phone experience.
For years I had the old fashioned rotary dial phone(black) with no answering machine, then around 1996 I switched to the push button version of the old fashioned rotary dial phone(beige). I’ve never owned a cordless phone or anything that takes batteries.
One day around the year 1998 I had an argument with my phone company about my bill. I felt they over charged me one month and I refused to pay the extra(it was like 8 bucks) and they refused to drop it from my bill. They started charging me fees and penalties for not paying that 8 bucks. This went on for many months. I continued to pay my bill but ignored their BS crap and all the extra fees and penalties. It multiplied until it was something like $200 bucks.
They turned my phone off. I called them from a pay phone and was so mad I called the girl every name in the book and told them I will never do business with them again and to delete my account for good. I never did pay the bill and I never heard back from them.
I lived for about 2 years I think with no phone at all. Maybe it was a little longer than that. Maybe 4 years.
Then one day I was doing some last minute christmas shopping in a mall and I walked past a cell phone shop with nobody in it and a nice sales girl sitting there all alone. she was about my age. I just started talking to her. I told her my phone story. She showed me her personal cell phone. I ended up buying the top of the line phone that had just come out by motorola(they called it the “megapixel” and a 2 year contract. She put her name and phone number in my phone.
It’s been cell phone only for me ever since. I have no use for a land line. I never even use half my minutes in a month and I have the cheapest plan I can get, except with the addition of text messaging. I even use my cell as a business phone and STILL never even use half the minutes. I’ve been a loyal verizon customer all this time because I travel a lot to small towns and rural areas for work and verizon works in the boonies where other carriers do not.
Good for you, but my post concerned people yakking on their cellphones for what seems like no useful purpose. Let me put it his way: since the origin of telephones up to about twenty years, society managed to survive without seeing and having people yak all the time on their cellphones. I’m not a Luddite, I have and use one myself. I’m just extremely curious to see what all the yakking is about. Vital matters or someone just using something to use it. Especially when people are operating large vehicles and turning corners one-handed while yakking.
I use a cell phone.
I don’t have a problem with technology, high-tech, or any specific technology per se. I think when folks like me admit to not liking Facebook, Kindle, etc. people assume we’re Luddites.
Not true. I take each particular type of technolgy and evaluate it for its usefulness. My problem is with folks who just hop on the new technology because it’s there. (Again, what they do is their business, just saying this is my opinion of the value of those choices.)
I use the Internet, obviously, because I get to go where I like, find out what I want to know, get what products I want to get. Facebook? There is nothing there for me. Kindle? Nothing there for me. (The one thing I like about it is that old folks and others with poor eyesight can adjust the size of the type.) Cellphones? Well, I have one because I’m on a friend’s plan, but when that ends, I’m getting a land line and getting rid of the cell phone. I don’t have kids or a wife so I don’t need it handy in case of emergencies from them, and my current job requires I have it in case of an emergency on the job. But if I didn’t have to have it, I’d dump it.
It’s all about using the level of technology that fits my lifestyle. What other folks do doesn’t impact me at all, and they can do what they like as long as I’m not forced to join in. I just don’t see any value in these other things. They just seem to add clutter to life, not richness, and if something is draining the value from life, I don’t want it.