The Off Season - Installment 02 - Another New Phone

I have written here a number of times in the past about my cellular telephones not because I consider such pieces to be terribly informative, but simply because I come to have a personal relationship with my cell phones that’s probably weird, odd, and maybe even a little unhealthy in that if I happen to leave the house without my phone I don’t feel only anxiously cut off from the rest of the world, but almost feel as if I’m walking around in public naked. 

 

The phone wasn’t much of an important part of my life as a kid.  It sat on the buffet in the dining room in the home in which I grew up, that lonely black spectacle of “modern communications” in the early 60’s, and everybody’s phone looked the same back then.  It took virtually forever to dial on the rotary wheel, and God forbid anybody’s number had a zero in it because that full whirl forward with one’s finger in the zero hole and the complete orbit backward added a seeming infinite amount of time on to making a call.  And when it rang?  Those twin bells could have awakened the dead with their piercing blare that might have had you think you were in a firehouse with the alarm bell going off!

One size fits all - the traditional black rotary phone. This one, like millions of others when I was growing up, was the only phone on the block. It was rented from the telephone company on a monthly basis - THE telephone company monopoly.

There was a time in my life when I was a young adult when I was driven crazy by a ringing telephone that I couldn’t answer in time.  I don’t know what I was thinking but a missed call to me was a horrible thing as if I’d been expecting news that I’d won a billion dollar lottery.  So much so did I hate unanswered calls that when an old wall phone became available to me I mounted it right next to the toilet in the apartment I lived in at the time.  Now, with caller I.D., if somebody’s calling and I don’t know who it is, I don’t even bother answering and let the machine pick it up unless I’m in the mood to mess with somebody and answer it for the simple sake of giving a very hard time to the calling party for infringing on my DO NOT CALL LIST status.

 

The Atrix, on the right, on the first day that I got it, beside "The Brick" which I'd carried for many years . Oh, how shiny it was, and how happy it made me. It was my very first smart phone.

But, enough background (i.e., stuff to write to make the post longer because I’m a wordy person according to those who know and love me the most).  A few days ago my beloved Motorola Atrix HD which I’d had since August of 2012 and which had been slowing down to the point of having to wait minutes at times for one app to give way to another, seemingly coughed one of its very last breaths.  A reboot (which I’d hoped would be like giving it CPR) froze it at the AT&T globe display from which it would not go forward.  Fifteen tries to do a virtual battery pull by holding down the volume down button and the on button simultaneously finally got it to come up one final time, giving me just enough “life” for me to race to the AT&T store and have its data transferred to a new phone.  Once that was complete I shut it down for the final time and have felt like I killed a friend ever since.  It sits, dead, on the side of my desk and the thought of throwing it in the garbage horrifies me.  I keep thinking it can be saved, somehow, but why?  I already replaced it.

 The poor Atrix next to his replacement, the Motorola Moto-E. Yep, I've been as faithful to my Motorola phones as they've been to me.

The new phone, like all of its Android buddies running the Lollipop operating system, is missing one HUGE feature that I loved on my old phone.  When I’m on the scooter with the bluetooth headset on, it can’t answer automatically.  That’s going to be a problem for me when I’m expecting a call because I’d come to rely on the auto-answer feature heavily when riding.  It’s not easy around here (with many roads that don’t have a shoulder that’s safe to stop on) to pull over, reach up into the helmet, and press a button on the side of the bluetooth headset.  And there isn’t a cell phone holder that can mount easily anywhere on the BV that I’d trust not to eject the phone when I’m practically losing the front tire in one of Pennsylvania’s mighty potholes.  I’m not as bad about missing a call as I was when I had the phone next to the crapper, but there are some calls I’d rather not miss so I can foresee times when I might stay home for fear of missing a call I’m expecting rather than to be on the road with the bike when it comes through.

New, and shiny, the Moto-E sits around waiting to get some calls, although on the weekend that's less likely to happen. He might have to wait another two days to get a little use.

Now, what to do about that beloved old Atrix?  The new one just doesn't feel like somebody to me yet, and there sits the dead one staring up at me like a betrayed companion.  Sigh!

No, I'm not writing ransom notes with different fonts.  The Blogger interface leaves a lot of room for improvement when it comes to changing fonts on the fly, and what comes out after publication sometimes little resembles what was on the screen prior to publishing.