To upgrade or not to upgrade
Give me just a plain old cellphone with no bells and whistles
My old friend Ava recently went to the
She never even knew if her phone had text messaging capability until a friend sent her one and asked if Ava had received it. She replied, “I don’t know.’’ Me neither.
Now the Observer is the first to admit there exists a plummy reverse snobbism among those of us who own vanilla cellphones incapable of any other function but calling. Bells and whistles are tacky. We’re rather like the folks who saw no future in the wheel. Nothing but phone, we say, and let’s be clear: The phone is for our convenience, not yours.
Anyway, Ava exposed herself to great peril. She could have oozed into a serious upgrade. The dreaded BlackBerry comes to mind. I told her later that she wouldn’t like herself in the morning if she ever got one.
Ava tiptoed her way up to the idea of a better phone the way a churchgoer considers sleeping in on Sunday mornings - awash in guilt. All she wanted, she claims, was another vanilla phone, maybe a sleeker model, maybe one of those fancy ones shaped like a deck of cards that she sees everywhere. But here’s the scary part: She was open to new ideas.
“I wanted to see if I could cross over to the other side,’’ she explains. “I drove a stick shift for years, and then I drove automatics.’’
To her credit, she didn’t cave. She never found a new vanilla one at Verizon and skedaddled. She apologized profusely to the salesman for wasting his time, because she knew he works on commission. While he was doing his best with Ava, she watched savvy cellphone users make their choices, pay, and leave. She is now terrified to go back to the Washington Street store and says she’ll next try the one in Hyannis, much like a pill addict who never uses the same pharmacy twice in a row.
Ava’s story prompted the Observer to visit said Verizon store last week to see about vanilla phones. I cannot imagine life without one, just as I cannot imagine life with anything fancier than the one I have now. Amanda, my capable wireless consultant, patiently explained everything to me as she would to a black lab. I could still get a vanilla phone, it turns out - a Samsung Knack that has photo and texting options you don’t have to activate - but that was pretty much it.
The vanilla phone thing is largely age-related. Most kids are not going to buy one. I mean, like, why would they want to do that? And many of the middle-aged descended into the BlackBerry morass some time ago, less because they wanted to than because they had to for business.
There are exceptions. My 26-year-old daughter has an ancient
The cellphone industry is making a huge mistake if it pushes us aging boomers to BlackBerrys. We won’t do it. We are a huge group, so make us happy. We want to see entire sections of stores devoted to vanilla phones. Scads of them. I want a mango one.
The BlackBerry divide hinges on whether or not you have a job job. If you work in an office and have to answer to a boss 24/7, you’ll have a BlackBerry or expire from panic.
“It’s not required, but it’s expected,’’ says Lori Allen, who works in commercial real estate. So she has two phones, a BlackBerry for work and a plain one for personal calls. “It’s like crack,’’ she concedes about her BlackBerry: “You’re trapped. We are accustomed to instant access.’’
Could she survive without one? “I can’t not have it,’’ she says. “I’m on it on weekends, texting all weekend long.’’ Poor woman.
Allen challenges me to try one for a couple of weeks and see how I feel about it. She assumes I’ll react as I did to my first hit of cannabis. There’s always that danger. I, in turn, challenge her to go without a BlackBerry for two weeks and see how she feels. “I’d probably have the shakes the first week,’’ she replies. “By the second week, my life would be more stress free, but that’s not an option for me.’’
Once you buy into text messaging and/or e-mail on a cellphone, you’re doomed. You’re always available. You can’t hide. You’ve lost any semblance of a private life. Call it the revenge of technology.
When I was an editor in an earlier life, long enough ago that we still used beepers, the only place I could escape electronic devices was up in the White Mountains, where I would repair on many a weekend.
I confess that I walked over to the BlackBerry counter, out of curiosity, when I was at Verizon. I asked Amanda about a basic one, and she showed me the Curve, a BlackBerry already considered long in the tooth that does just fine. She has one herself. I looked at others, too, and concluded that the keyboard letters on all of them are so tiny that I’m sure my messages would resemble my daughter’s first foray on a typewriter. I knew I didn’t belong there, and, like Ava, left with my integrity intact.
Allen, by the way, says her father just bought his first cellphone: “He doesn’t turn it on, but he says he will if I download an Irish ringtone for him.’’
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com. 