The tyranny of the blinky thing

I resisted having a cell phone for years and years. I had one way back in 1999 or so, because I was travelling a lot with Phish and Freddie required me to have one. Nine times out of ten, though, I couldn’t find the damn thing and when I did manage to locate it, it wasn’t charged.

At some point, I realized I was paying for something I was never, ever using, so I got rid of it. I’m not a ‘phone person,’ largely due to the fact that I spent my teenage years in a house that didn’t HAVE one. That would be a totally foreign concept to a teenager today, but 20 years ago, there was just the one phone in the house, usually. And we didn’t have one.

I blame my parents’ hippie lifestyle for my social awkwardness. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’m um, socially awkward to begin with, no siree! It’s the hippies.

Anyway, fast-forward a few years after I dumped the last phone and when I got all knocked up, Freddie required me to have a phone again. My protests were pretty much the same as everything else I protested while pregnant, namely the fact that women had been getting knocked up and having babies for millenia without cell phones, and I could probably pull it off as well. He wasn’t swayed.

That phone served me pretty well for a few years. It could make and receive calls and texts, which was fun. I only lost it a few times, and only had to get it replaced once. It was small and I even managed to keep it charged most of the time. It got me through pregnancy and having a newborn/toddler/mental case kid, and then Phish came back and it helped me navigate that, too!

Then. Oh, then. Freddie got this idea that we could get me a fancy cell phone (I still say cell phone – am v. old) and get rid of our house phone, which was almost never used. He managed to score a deal on a fancy new Droid X and decided that would be *my* phone (as well as the house phone). Hmmm.

The lure of a fancy phone is almost too much. Freddie has a BlackBerry, which is fine when we need to get directions or something but it’s v. slow and the little keys on the keyboard are sooooo teensy! It’s laughable. Having a fancy phone that *does stuff* would be nice, I thought.

Friday night he brought home the Droid.

I have yet to put it down.

I am also now a slave to the blinky thing. The blinky thing? Well, the Droid syncs up with Facebook and Google/gmail and pretty much any other thing you want to sync it up to. So whenever I get a new email (I get a lot of email) the Droid goes “BLLOICK!” and the little green light starts blinking.

*blink*

*blink*

*blink*

*HELLO I ARE BLINKING*

*blink*

Now, I have given Freddie no small amount of shit over the fact that when his BlackBerry dings he lunges for it to check his messages or whatever. I hate this. Mostly because he does it while driving. Or during dinner. Or in the middle of a conversation with me. He said “you don’t understand!”

I do now.

*blink*

*blink*

*O HAI, ARE BLINKING HERE*

*blink*

*blink*

*blink*

*lunge.*