Sunday February 15, 2004

*Gulp*  Got a new phone today.  It was so hard to let go.  Actually, I still haven’t.  So now I’m carrying two phones in my pocket, since I’m not all that sure which one will ring if someone calls me.  I’m tempted to call myself from another phone line just to see what happens, but I’m not supposed to use the new one until it’s charged for 10 hours, but you also never know when the old one is going to get disconnected, so it’s better to just hold on to both, so if someone calls me and the old phone still works, I’ll pick it up there, but if it doesn’t work anymore, then maybe I’ll pick it up on the new phone, though I haven’t charged it yet, so I’m not supposed to do that, and the salesman made it sound like it was a really big deal to really let the thing charge up fully that first time.  Sigh… I honestly I don’t know what I’m going to do if the phone rings tonight.  It’s weird how certain situations really cause some serious mental paralysis in me.  Sigh…

I still remember going to the AT&T store that Februrary of 2002.  Mommy went with me.  Nobody but dad had ever had a cell phone before.  My first cell phone!  I was soooo intent on getting the Nokia 8260.  Everybody else seemed to have it.  For some reason, the salesman kept showing me the Panasonic Allure TX310.  “No…” I said with a grimace.  “It is so… tall and… not… sleek! I like how the Nokia is small (and therefore, cool).”  He told me that the Panasonic was only $25 with a one-year contract.  The Nokia was $99.  “I know, but… well, obviously the Nokia must be better!”  I was getting rather annoyed at his attempt to play matchmaker between me and the Panasonic when I clearly wanted to take the Nokia home.  Even my mom, seeing our interaction, avoided all attempts to reason with me.  He told me it was only a one year plan, and that if I didn’t like it, I could always get a new one then.  “But I don’t want to have a phone that I don’t want for a year!  I already know which one I want!”  The Panasonic didn’t even have any games!  Yet somehow… somehow… I really don’t remember how, which leads me to believe he played some Jedi mind trick on me, I ended up going home with the Panasonic Allure TX310.  What happened?!?

However, it’s been two years now, and I can say that the Panasonic has served me well.  Sure, it’s grown senile now and can’t store the same amount of charge as the days of its youth, but it’s been by my side like a faithful friend through thick and thin.  Oh, the memories…  the cheap faux-leather case that the store gave me for free that I had to modify with scissors because they forgot to cut a hole for the charger to plug into the phone, the cool way that the phone could clip to the inside of my pants pocket instead of requiring a belt, the Consumer Reports that revealed that I had one of the phones with the highest amount of radiation nationwide, the way my hip actually ached from the additional weight of the phone for the first few weeks (or was that a psychosomatic reaction to knowing it had the highest amounts of radiation?), daily alarms at 7:00 AM (I swear there were days it just *conveniently* didn’t ring) and 4:45 PM (to remind me that I should think about going home at some point), the Kogepan phone ornament that broke off so many times I gave up trying to put him back on, the many times it has alleviated my terrible fear of get-lost-a-phobia, the calls I’d get at 12:30 in the morning during my first year in management, when I told employees to call me if they EVER had questions, the many, many dropped calls that occur every time I’m driving down Embarcadero, the voice-recorder feature I never once used, the five backlight colors, the antenna that finally broke off and fell somewhere under my chair at AMC Theatres when I went to watch The Two Towers, the ghetto copper wire coil that my dad fashioned into a makeshift antennae to make up for the one that broke off and was lost forever, the trusty mechanical pencil that always accompanies the phone (and only because the phone’s height it such that it can accommodate my pencil; the Nokia 8260 would’ve never worked), the many times I’ve gone on trips and forget the blasted phone charger back home, the ominous “beep beep” of the low-battery warning tone that gradually became the phone’s favorite utterance, the battery that just grew weaker and weaker until there were days when my phone greeting to just about anybody was, “Hi.  Hey, can you call me at this other number?..”

Well, I’ve developed a certain pride in having a phone that I’ve quite literally  never once in my two years encountered someone else having.  Somehow, because it’s different, with it’s candy bar figure and mechanical pencil and beltless clip and ghetto homemade antenna, it’s been a pleasure to own and use.  It’s been such an integral part of my life.  I suspect I would feel pretty lost without a cell phone now.  This was a first cell phone to remember.  So it will be in loving and bittersweet memory that my Panasonic Allure TX310 will be retired, to take no more calls, to beep no more in low-battery agony, to irradiate my hip no more.  Goodbye, friend.  Goodbye.

Hello, Nokia 3560.  I bought you today for $46.54 by renewing a one-year contract with AT&T under the Stanford plan.  Hmm… color screen, polyphonic tones, games…  Okay, let’s see what you’re made of.