more is always better, or not

As part of my job, I get a cell phone from the company. I have blogged about said phone before. I hate it. I hate cell phones in general. To me, it's more of an electronic leash, giving my job 24/7 access to me, than any kind of convenience. Yes, I get to use it for personal calls and that is sometimes convenient, but make no mistake. It's here because they want to find me....anytime they want. I liked the good ol' days far better, where you couldn't talk on your phone and attempt to drive. If you needed to make a phone call, you got out of your car and used a pay phone somewhere, thus not even giving you the opportunity to overestimate your ability to multitask.

So we get to this morning in car pool...where one of my Steeler fan kids hadn't finished his homework.

"Does anyone have a calculator?"

Lot's of mumbles but no affirmative answers.

"Mr. Lumberyard, do you have a cell phone with you?"

"Yes."

"Does it have a calculator?"

"Well, honestly, I don't know. Here, look at it."

"Good, it does, but this is an old phone. You should get a blackberry."

So the youngster launches into this speech about how dad's work offered him a blackberry and he refused it...which is true. It's bad enough that they can find me all the time. All I need now is to be pulled from dreamland in a Saturday afternoon nap to hear, "Well, I sent you an e-mail twenty minutes ago and copied your boss, but you didn't respond. So I sent another ten minutes ago and copied him again, figuring that would get your attention. Since it didn't, I'm calling." That, and yet another spam recepticle...I really need one of those.

So the Steeler fan kids all chime in...

"Both my mom and dad have blackberries. You can do so much more with one and it has cool games and you can text message easy with it because it has a keyboard and you could e-mail our parents when you can't drive in the morning and...why don't you want one?"

"I don't need to text message anyone."

The youngster..."But I do!"

Ahhhhh, the madness behind the method.

I turn the phone on when I'm going to be away from the house or office, and when that's the case, I don't want to be e-mailing anybody. Nor do I want them e-mailing me and expecting an immediate response. Actually, I don't want them calling me either, but there are necessary evils. I'm....out doing things, and they don't involve e-mail. They don't involve video games. If I wanted to play those, I'd have stayed at home. They don't involve text messages...If I need to do that, I'll just call.

It's bad enough that I have a phone with me....I really don't care to drag the rest of the e-world along as well. So yes, my "old" phone is about a year and a half old...and it doesn't e-mail....and I like that. I can understand the necessity for all that crap if you work outside an office a lot, and travel a lot, and don't have a desktop computer you can get to whenever you need to, but I don't do that shit. My phone can access the web, but I called the phone company and specifically had that ability turned off, because I did it by accident once and got charged for it, even though it didn't do anything once the web was accessed, and it was for all of two seconds. (That's kind-of a funny story. I called to complain about this charge on my bill I didn't understand. The woman at the phone company said, "Well, you accessed the web." "Oh, I did? How'd I do that?" "You must have hit zero twice. That does it." "Did I do anything once I got there?" "It doesn't look like it. You were there for two seconds." "Can you stop it from doing that?" They took the charge off the bill and disabled the double zero thing.). It has a calculator though, if you should need one. I haven't disabled that feature....yet.

Five years ago they gave me a Palm Pilot, because we developed software for one and we needed a test environment. Once that was done, they let me keep it, even though it wasn't technically "mine", but it just sat on my desk and grew dust. The most use it got was an occasional game. I finally just turned it back in. I really had no practical use for the thing. Some things are pretty cool, but if you don't need them, you just...well...don't need them.