May as Well Have Been Talking Swedish

Today kina closes an era.

I’m retiring the old LG flip phone, which I’ve used for I don’t know how long. We’ve had it on a pay-as-you-go plan forever, and it’s served well. Usually, I either forgot to bring it with me, forgot to turn it on, or just never heard the ring or felt the buzz when someone was calling.

I enjoyed it, though. A few times one of my scouts – typically one of the new ones – asked to borrow my phone, likely because he wanted to look something up on the Internet. The looks on those faces when I handed over the phone were precious. And they weren’t shy about dissing its antiquity.

“Ew,” one scout said when he looked at the phone in a pizza parlor (I’m old enough I say pizza parlor). “It has buttons.”

Whenever I handed it over, I felt like the Swedish Chef handling his blunderbussen. And I was fine with that. I knew how the blunderbussen worked.

But no more.

Today I switch over to a smartphone.

That doesn’t necessarily bode well.

Though I have used my Kindle Fire extensively, I don’t have a good track record with smartphones. I had to borrow one a few years ago to make a call at work, and when the call was over I had no idea how to hang up. (I’m so old I talk about hanging up when I’m making a phone call. I also still dial a number.)

When my wife is driving and needs me to do something with her phone, it inevitably boils down to her pulling over somewhere so she can figure out what I did to it.

But my wife found a killer family cell phone plan and decided, with older phones languishing in drawers, it was time to get them in use. So we all have phones – with the exception of the youngest, who does not. He and his mother discussed the situation over the weekend behind closed doors. I don’t know what kind of deal she struck or what kind of logic she used, but he seems if not necessarily OK with the situation, at least resigned to it. Further bulletins as events warrant on that front to be sure.

We spent two hours at the Tmobile store over the weekend, getting the new plan set up. My wife was in charge of that. I mainly spent my time wandering the store and blowing my nose in a discreet manner. I was dispatched to look at phones on their Big Wall O’ Phones, and was tempted to point out the newish-looking flip phone there. Found out it won’t work with the plan we’re looking at. So I found a few possibilities and then went home to look at them elsewhere. Found the one my father-in-law recommended (more than the one I was looking at) for $40 less than the store had it, so that’s where we went.