I once wrote that while I enjoyed being a technological contrarian and resisting the urge to go buy an iPhone, I thought that it was inevitable. This weekend may have inched me even a little bit closer to that inevitability. Normally, I don’t bring my Blackberry to the field with me when Krissy and I have a football game. Instead, it sits in my truck (uselessly, some people may add parenthetically) until the game is over…not this past weekend though. I foolishly left it in a side pocket of my duffel bag while we played. Meanwhile, a fluke 15-20 minute rainstorm decided to pass by just as the game started. The refs flirted with the idea of calling the game off, but eventually decided to let us play it out…which was a lot of fun to be honest. I probably hadn’t played a muddy, rain-soaked football game since I was a kid. It also ruined my Blackberry though. I used to think my Blackberry Bold was the tank of all smartphones, capable of having giant boulders smashed down on it while showing no ill effects. Unfortunately, it apparently was not an amphibious tank. A better phone case probably would have helped, but you will be hardpressed to find any Blackberry accessories anywhere but online anymore.
Since I had insurance on the phone, Krissy and I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal to just go swap out a new phone from a Verizon store, but we couldn’t find a store in the area that even carried that. We then figured we would just call Verizon and have them ship us 1, but we discovered that we would have to fork over $100 for the replacement phone (the retail price of a new Blackberry Bold is $200…so much for insurance). We decided to simply deactivate my data plan for now and reactivate my old enV 2 for the time being. This was distressing to me. I had had my Blackberry for almost 2 years, but I had just now finally started to use it for what is actually good about Blackberries compared to other smartphones. I finally synced-up my work email with my phone, I had actually gotten into the habit of using the phone’s calendar to set reminders for appointments, and I developed a system of internal memos so that I always had running grocery and to-do lists with me at all times…trivial things, I know, but what can I say? I had become just as much of a slave to technology as the next poor slob.
By the way, what kind of guy would be texting courtside with Rihanna sitting next to him? Wait, don't answer that.
At some point late on Sunday I entered the acceptance stage though. I thought, how quickly I became dependent on something that didn’t even exist 10 years ago (well, it existed, but I don’t think I knew anyone my age who had a smartphone until I was well into college…it didn’t exist in my world at least). Somehow people managed to live before smartphones or cell phones though. When you left the house, you didn’t worry about how someone would contact you; they would contact you when they contacted you. Now, if I leave the house and forget my cell phone, I feel as though my entire family is going to die by the time I get back to it…and yet I don’t think full family homicides were any more prevalent before the cell phone age started. I also thought about the money we would save in the months that we would be paying for only 1 data plan instead of 2. All of it made me think about the Louis CK clip that went viral a few years ago where he famously said, “Everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy.” Not a bad perspective…maybe I would just go back to a regular ol’ cell phone and be done with smartphones altogether. How much better is the quality of my life by being constantly plugged into my email and the Internet anyway?
And then Krissy came home from work and said she had been talking all day with coworkers and family trying to get them to lend me 1 of their old smartphones that had been lying around until I got a new 1 of my own. Apparently, the unlimited data packages that Krissy and I have are not offered anymore. Since we already have those packages, we are grandfathered into them, and they can’t be taken away…but if we didn’t call up Verizon within a certain amount of time we would lose that option forever (on my phone at least). I tried to reason with Krissy that this was ok, and that I could survive on a lesser data plan. After all, I don’t use that much “data” to begin with, and I think I could make do not playing any word games on my phone until I got home from work. Let’s just say that my wife knows a bargain when she sees 1 though, and she was having none of this. Probably smart in the long run, but I had just gotten to the point that I was actually ok not having a smartphone for a while! Oh well…I guess I’m resigned to being a slave of the smartphone again. Just another poor sap who can’t stop taking the world in from a 3 inch screen while real life passes him by…nevermind, it’s my turn in Lexulous. Peaceout, motherf*****.
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