Technological Disaster

Disaster has struck.

On Saturday I forgot to charge my phone, so that night while I was at work, it ran out of battery and shut down. Ever since then, it thinks that running out of battery and shutting down is a thing it has to do every night. As much as I hate to admit it, it... might be time.

It’s always a terrible choice, deciding whether to put down a pet. But you know it’s time when they’re so old they can’t get up to play with a ball, or so sick they can’t roll over anymore. That time between their obvious discomfort and your unwillingness to part with their company is the worst. But at least there’s nothing forcing you to get a new ferret after your old ferret has departed this world. Unless you have an absolute need to have your toes gnawed affectionately.

In today’s technology saturated world, our need for portable communication devices continues to increase. It seems like everybody’s got a phone, an MP3 player, a camera, and a tablet. And then they need a portable wifi hub to connect all of those things to the cloud. We feel like we need these things to be connected to the world.

Twenty years ago, you didn’t need any of those things. A computer was something people primarily used for work, and those people were usually computer scientists or engineers. Teenagers had walkmans to play their favorite audio tapes while they went rollerblading. Cameras used film. And if your car broke down in the middle of nowhere at night, you were stuck sleeping in the backseat or walking to the nearest farmhouse to call a tow truck. The world has changed. Now, one device can do all the things that four used to. And we rely on it. No sense in disturbing the folks half a mile up the road when you can call a tow truck from the driver’s seat of your car.

I guess I could always get a "new" version
of my phone, the Alias 2 from
Overseas Electronics.

I got my phone in February of 2010, so it’s 410 years old, in phone years. (That’s a decade per month.) I have known people who have barely gotten used to their old phone before tossing it away and getting a newer model. I could never understand that. If it works, why not use it until you have to get a new one? Tossing out a perfectly good phone always seemed like a waste to me.

Aside from the fact that I’m used to my phone’s quirky ways and don’t want a change, I got my phone right on the edge of the industry switching to touch screens. Mine is one of the last without one. Today, the industry is right on the edge of switching to full touch screens and nothing else. If I want a phone with buttons, I’ve pretty much got to get one today or resign myself to using T9 word to text in the future.

I know that whatever phone I decide to get, I will get used to. I will learn its ways and it will learn mine, and we will be a perfect fit.

Until disaster strikes in three years and I have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new era of technology... again.