Ring Ring! Are you going to answer that?

I hate phones. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve always hated the phones I’ve owned. There are plenty of phones out there that I love, but I’ve never been fortunate enough to own them. When I was about 10, I remember going into the AT&T Bell store at Minnehaha Center (back when “Bell” was still attached to the AT&T brand). They used to have the coolest phones. There was one in a big, oval sea shell which I had planned on putting in my bathroom in my apartment in Manhattan (I had big dreams when I was 10, which included a red corvette). My favorite was the French-style phone. I think Katherine Chancellor had one on “The Young and the Restless”. I found one years later in a Hello Kitty store but the base was way to light and it would fling around everywhere whenever I tried to answer it. Plus, there was plumage wrapped around the receiver, which always stuck to my lip gloss.

The phones I owed always had a loud, horrid ring tone; never a pretty, dainty, pleasant one. It was a kind of ring that sounded like I was already being yelled at by the caller before I even answered. You may be thinking to yourself that now, in this modern era of choosing anything one wants for a ring tone, why haven’t I found a nice ring tone yet? Because I have the plan that doesn’t allow me to. In order to get the nice ring tones, you have to buy the large plans with tons of bells and whistles that I never use. I have the basic plan with 300 minutes per month (voice only) and I barely make it to the half-way mark. They’re not going to give a nice ring tone to someone who won’t hear it often enough.

Texting on the other hand…..I am starting to go off the deep end with texting. At first, I hated it because I don’t have a normal keyboard on my phone, it’s a number pad and trying to type words on a number pad is excruciating to someone who can type an average of 92 wpm on a normal keyboard. I didn’t like the general idea of texting because I thought it wasn’t personal enough. I was also a bit annoyed with others around me who would text while just standing at a bus stop. For some reason, this really really annoyed me. No one was looking around anymore. There was stuff happening all around, people to see, eyes to make contact with, squirrels to watch duke it out over a French fry out of a U of M garbage can, and no one was catching this great stuff.

A few things started to change my outlook. First, I realized how convenient a cell phone could be. I still needed a landline to let people into my building, but being able to call people while outside of my apartment was a feeling much like the first time I was allowed to stay home alone – total FREEDOM. If I had one while I was on jury duty, my spring break would have been a lot better.

Second, I realized how even much more freeing it was to be able to respond after having time to think through my answer and then type it out accordingly, which is a wonderful option for a stammerer to have.

So now I’m sold on texting. I want to do it all the time. I wish I would have come to this conclusion when picking out my service plan. I chose the voice only plan where texting was extra. Now, my texting charges make up the bulk of my bill.

I am currently in the interesting position of either upgrading my service plan (which will lock me in for 24 months), or finding a new phone and starting fresh. I’m considering getting a phone with a camera, so I can take pictures of squirrels duking it out over a French fry at a U of M garbage can. Seriously, you have to see that because it is hilARious!

So a new phone is probably in my future, but this leads me to another thought – am I setting myself up for a series of arguments and misunderstandings based on the content of my texts? What I think is funny and what others think is funny can sometimes be two TOTALLY different things.

There is a group of people who know me well enough to be able to understand my meaning, but I sometimes forget that there is a much larger group of people in the world who don’t. Lately, I’ve been forgetting this when I send emails at work and when I tweet. Or maybe they are laughing and I’m just not “seeing” it. That’s one big downfall with this worldwide communication change. You don’t have the immediate facial expression/reaction in a text message. Many times I really miss that. Emoticons are not a human face.