October 20, 2008

Yet Another Foray Into the Jungle of Tele-Technology

I need your advice.

Last week I got an e-mail from my cell phone company, telling me that it was time to get myself a new phone. They seem really eager to send one along, absolutely free, if I will just agree to send them back a large check every month for the next two years.

How could anyone pass up a deal like that?

I probably should mention that the phone I have now is working just fine. And I’m still discovering things it can do – like download stock quotes in real time, or fly a fully-loaded Boeing 747.

Maybe I’m such a sucker for new technology because I’ve been around so long. You see, I can remember when I was a kid and my family got our first television set, one of the first in the neighborhood. It featured a grainy black and white picture screen mounted in a cabinet that was made by taking the wheels off of a box car and adding some mahogany veneer.

On a good evening you could get three channels, although sometimes the only thing to watch was a “test pattern.” This consisted of a very technical-looking series of circles and numbers inexplicably surrounding the portrait, in profile, of an American Indian wearing a feather headdress.

Back in those days, a telephone was a big black lump of bakelite with a 13-pound handset and a finger-busting rotary dial. We paid something like $10 a month to rent our telephone, since you were not allowed to own one.

I can still remember the stir of excitement in our house when the Phone Company (there was only one) announced the availability of new phones in “designer colors” – diarrhea green or cat-puke gold. My mom, hoping to match the shag carpet in the living room, opted for the cat-puke gold.

I marveled through the years at the never-ending parade of telecommunication miracles: Extra-long cords that could reach into the next room for “the ultimate in phoning freedom.” Dials built right into the handset. And touch-tone phones. Later, in the 1980s, I had one of those early automobile-installed cell phones, a miracle of space-age engineering that could often sustain bursts of conversation for more than 15 consecutive seconds and crush the suspension on a 3,800-pound Cadillac.

So I am still amazed and delighted that we citizens of the 21st Century can all carry sleek little fully functional telephones around in our pockets. At this point I’m even having a fair amount of trouble getting wrapped around the idea that a lot of the current cell phones can even show movies and streaming television, on a crisp color screen that is just about the same size as the one in my family’s old Philco.

And this dizzying barrage of features offered by the new phones is exactly why I need a little help from my readers. I need you to send me an email – address it to mike@ipathetic.com – and tell me what you like about your particular cell phone.

You see, I’m thinking that maybe I should get a phone with a built-in QWERTY key pad, which is pretty much like the one you have on your regular computer. It’s called that because QWERTY is the word you get when you fall asleep while you’re writing your column and your forehead lands on the upper-left hand corner of the keyboard.

Or possibly I should get one with a built-in two megapixel camera, assuming that I had any idea what a “megapixel” is. Or what I would do with two of them.

Or maybe I should just settle for a slight upgrade to the phone I have – maybe one that will show animated color graphs of the stock market swirling down the toilet, and actually land that 747.

Copyright ©2008 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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