The Cell Phone Saga

I've had three cell phones over the past six years. The first I got was Nicole's old one when she moved to England to live with her mom. When that contract expired, we got a new set of phones. After four years with them, I hated them so much I wanted a flip style phone. We renewed our contract with Cingular, now AT&T, and got the flip style. This is what it looked like two years ago:

This is what it looks like now:

Apparently, cell phones don't appreciate falling a couple of feet onto hard concrete floors so much. Who knew? Robin says it looks like I scalped it. LOL. Amazingly enough, I was actually able to make one call yesterday afternoon before it went caput.

So, today we decided two things.

#1: We are paying way too much for cell phone service. We had the Roll-Over Minutes Plan with AT&T and holy mackeral! I didn't realize how much that cost per month! We were paying more for our cells that we barely use than we were for our home phones with many long-distance calls made to Canada and beyond! So, we called the good folks at AT&T and got on their least expensive plan. Thank goodness! That'll save us quite a bit on our monthly bill--not to mention we realized that we could also get 15% off per month because Robin's retired military! Whoohooo!

#2: We needed to get new cell phones. I walked in wanting a basic phone. I don't ever take photos. When I have in the past (my students had to show me how to even activate the camera! Ya, I'm so techno-savvy, aren't I?), I have no idea how to get it off the phone, so I wind up deleting it. I don't ever text either. I don't get texting (I must be getting old!) so I never do it. Why not just wait 'til you can actually speak to the person? Why waste your time writing in a cryptic phonetic fashion when you don't have to? Besides, I can never figure out what NE1 means, let alone text a message like that to anyone who'd have a clue.

We went to the AT&T store to get new phones. Apparently, we could get phones for free as long as we bought $60 worth of accessories....all of which I didn't need. Uh, explain to me how the phone is free when I have to buy stuff I don't need or want in order to get it free? But, if I didn't, the phone was $120. Seriously, WTF?

So after much humming and hawing, we ended up with these as our new phones:


Let's just say we have phone insurance now.