I am officially the last person on earth to get a smartphone
This statement is false. I actually know three people in my life who do not own a smartphone and one of them is only 30 years old. She is not the Luddite* thought, I think that might be me because for so long I was so proud that I did not have a smartphone. I thought I was better than the masses and I was saving so much money. I thought I was protecting my privacy even thought it was sometimes super annoying to not always have information at my fingertips.
I did have a cell phone, a dumb phone. I have had one of those since 2002 when my parents got me a pay-as-you go phone for my birthday. Then in 2005, I stopped using that phone and got myself a phone with a contract because the pay-as-you go model was becoming more expensive than not having a contract.
I have gone through four dumb phones and I only lost one of them and that was after owning and using it for almost five years. That sounds crazy even to me. Who uses a phone for that long in this day and age?
(Here is a picture of the phone I used until this past Tuesday)
Here is short story about the phone pictured above.
Right before my son was born, my husband and I decided it was time to get our phone situation figured out. He has had a smart phone on and off since 2009, but we both decided to keep our cell phone plan on the cheap since we were excepting a baby and I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. We got matching models of this phone pictured above in October 2015.
We both quickly found our new phones to be super poorly designed and infuriating. When using the phone, calls were constantly dropped. After a few months, it was difficult to send text messages because the touch screen would suddenly stop allowing the user to hit “send”. This problem could sometimes be fixed by turning off and turning back on the phone, but who wants to do that several times a day?
Eventually, I went back to using the phone I got in early 2012 and my husband kept on using the s*itty blue phone. Last fall though, his mother offered him her old iPhone and he began using that one. Then I started using the stupid, blue phone again in last October when I left my long suffering 2012 model on the top of the car as I drove away after buckling my son into his car seat.
So why did I get a smartphone now? The short answer is because I could not stand to use the blue dumb phone any longer. It would drop calls anytime my face seemed to touch the phone. I was getting used to calling people back two or three times a call. The final straw thought was when we had a flat tire and he could see how annoyed I got when I was having a hard time calling AAA because of my awful phone.
My husband got the phone for me second hand and I must confess I love it more because it is second hand. It is a Galexy S4. I don’t loath it at all. And I thought I would.
For quite sometime, I have been hating on businesses that seem to cater to people with smart phones. I would shop at Target but give the cashier a death stare when she told me the savings I could get if I signed up for Cartwheel. Before my smart phone I felt alienated because my local Chick Fil-A recently changed their free breakfast deal from a weekly thing that all customers could participate in, to a deal that you could only get if you had the app. Don’t even get me started on mommy dates, people would change their minds or meetup abilities at the last second and I would not know about it because I did not internet access in my car.
So we will see how this goes for me. For a longtime I liked to think I wasn’t one of those drones who was always on their phone. I liked to believe that I was living in the moment instead of being one of those people who is only experiencing life thought the viewfinder on their phone. But now I am one of them. I mean of us!
And the real kicker is that once we added my new phone to our cell phone plan THE COST OF OUR PLAN ACTUALLY WENT DOWN. We were holding off on getting smartphones to save money and now our plan is actually cheaper.
The moral of this story is that I was not actually being financially smart by holding off on getting a smartphone.
[*Luddite: I am using this to mean a technologically inept person. I know I am not using it in the historically correct usage.]
