Out of the stone age

Under no circumstances would I ever say that the husbeast and I are technophobes. We are so completely far from being ludites. Looking around our house it is east to see that we are both rather tech savy. Alright, he is tech savy, I just have some nice toys I like.

He is a computer guy though and well I love them even if I can't speak to them the way he can. We have always had pretty top of the line fancy stuff when it comes to computer like things. I mean we have also had frankencomputers that he has built from boxes of scraps, but that was more back when we were starving college kids.

There is one area though where we have both always resisted the tech call; phones. We both hate phones. Now I was totally the poster child for a second phone line when I was a teenager, you know back when you needed two landlines if you used internet or had a teenage daughter. I outgrew that phase when I graduated high school. Really I would have been less in that phase in high school if my best friend had had a computer and we could have chatted online.

I just prefer text to talking over the phone. I love talking in person, but I find phone conversations to always be a little awkward. I would much rather you IM or email me a question than call me on the phone for the answer. If I feel it needs an actual discussion then I might dial your number, but really that is the exception and not the rule.

The husbeast hates phones because he makes his living talking on them all day long. I can remember a point when we used to buy really cheap phones for the house because he would throw the handsets at walls when they would ring too often.

When we first got cell phones, we were among the last of our friends and family to give in to the trend. We both agreed that we really just didn't want them. We couldn't see the need to have a phone on us all the time. Alas we spent copious amounts of time driving back and forth across Texas and not being anywhere near our house, so we had to cave and get one.

Well then we decided that it was cheaper for us to both have cell phones and no land line, so we suddenly became a two cell phone household. Still we were on the phones you got for free when you signed your phone contract. It made calls, that was all we needed. There were no cameras or texting or anything on them.

The urge to text was low. Not a lot of my friends were texting, and if they were I didn't care. I could live without it, and the husbeast just didn't seem to get what the appeal was. We would upgrade our phones and the sales guy would desperately try and unload a text package on us, and we would scoff at him.

Finally I decided, under the oppression of an office that allowed us to do nothing but work or pretending to work, that texting would be  my only relief. We still had the craptastic cheap phones, but I was a texting fool. I was madly in love with texting. I really couldn't see how I had lived without.

So it was that the next time we got new phones we got ones with keyboards on them. They were still no where near the top of the line phones, or even the fancy ones. We were still firmly behind the times in phones. With the addition to a keyboard though the husbeast began to text. He still hated his phone but we found the convenience of being able to chat while at work.

Almost all of my friends have smart phones, and have for years. Hell my mother has had a smartphone forever now. Our phones had all data blocked. We couldn't send or receive pictures let alone play words with friends. I haven't a clue what Instagram is. This is probably why I can't understand Twitter. I just really didn't see the point in all of it. Why would I want to be that distracted?

Of course I used to say the same thing about texting.

About a week ago the touch screen on my phone started dying. I would press enter and get a 9. That is if the damn thing would respond to me at all. I asked the husbeast and he reported his phone was doing the same thing. It shouldn't have surprised us, the phones were two years old. They had the decency of dying just as our contract was ending and could get the upgrade price on new phones.

It was as we stood staring at the wall of phones in the Sprint store that we realized that we were so woefully behind the times. All of the phones in store were smartphones. If we wanted a non smart phone we were going to have to order one online.

So we debated; do we really need smartphones? Do we need or even want that sort of burden? Yes I think it is a burden. I think having all of that stuff with me all the time is a lot to deal with. There was also the question of would we really use them? Would our use, after the initial shiny and new period, be worth the increased cost of our phone plans, not to mention the huge price tag on these phones?

Finally we admitted defeat and decided on a making the change.

Of course this time we decided that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right. We didn't get the small cheap phones that would suffice. Nothing in the beginner line for us. Nope we jumped in with both feet. We picked the top of the line that the store had to offer. In the end we both walked away with android phones, HTC Evo's to be exact.

The husbeast has a slight advantage over me, having had a tablet for about a year now he is at least used to the concept of how a smart phone works. I on the other hand feel like an idiot. I have been sitting poking at the screen since we got them yesterday afternoon, desperately trying to figure out how to work my phone. I've managed to figure out how to text, which is of the utmost importance, and I have managed to download some game apps. I also connected my gmail and facebook, which I still can not decide if that was a smart idea or not.

I am sure if you were to ask me in a month if I liked my new smart phone I would tell you I couldn't remember how I lived without it. As of right now though, I am just trying to figure out how to use it.