Batphones 'R Us

A few days ago my cell phone (a Motorola V120e) up and croaked on me. I put it down, plugged in the charger, and the next day, had no display. Previously, I'd called the phone Sisyphus as a tribute to the hapless dude from Greek mythology who was cursed to push a giant fucking rock up a hill for the rest of his existence. Try as he might, he'd never get the rock to the top of the hill. The stone would always roll back down to the bottom and he'd have to start again. Similarly, my batphone was an electronic tether, hence, I was tied to the rock.

More recently, in a spate of bad attitude, I decided to change the banner on the phone to Phone of 666. Not being a Christian, I don't feel particularly bound by the use of the digit 6 repeated three times, but I'm always amused to see how casual use of that number always gets people going. My informal callsign as a commander was "666" when I was talking to one particular battle captain, who used to use the moniker "Saber 3 Chuck" (versus "Saber 3 Charlie") over the radio. As I used to explain, with a troop callsign like "Shadow", and my position as commander, you could actually make a (pretty specious) case for 666 as a callsign. Uh-huh.

About two weeks after the Phone of 666 transformation (along with the startup message "Blood Makes The Grass Grow," probably a better barometer of my mood at the time) . I'm sure it has nothing to do with the electronics crapping out on the phone, but it makes for entertaining coincidence.

Unfortunately, since Verizon Wireless doesn't offer the Motorola V120e (which I actually thought was a pretty decent phone since I got it for free as a promotional offer when I signed on with them) any more, I'm in the position of trying to get another phone. I think I'll be settling on a Motorola V265.

I've resisted getting camera phones, phones with color screens, and more pointedly, phones with polyphonic ringers, particularly ones for which you can download elaborate ringers (which for the most part, have utterly fucking obnoxious hop-hop ringers when you hear them in public). My answer to that was to manually program in the ringers (and the V120e had about the same tonal quality as a battery-powered LCD watch) to something I liked. Not surprisingly, my ringer was the first few measures of John Williams' "Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back. Yeah, Darth Vader's theme. Other ringers I had programmed included John Carpenter's theme to Halloween and the theme to the old Warner Brothers cartoon Pinky and the Brain.

Too bad none of those ringers are transferable. Now my dilemma is going to be which MP3s I intend to reduce to phone-ringer size. I think The Exorcist will join Darth Vader in the phone.

So...I enter the modern era and will probably get one of the phones I vilify so much. I'm not sure how I became such a Luddite about technology, but I think my philosophy has been "newer is not always better" for long enough where it includes my attitudes about consumer electronics. Items in the house falling in that category:
TV (8 years old)
VCR (6 years old)
DVD player (3 years old)
Stereo (a Dolby Surround 2.0 receiver that I got 9 years ago that's still going strong)
Computers (5 and 4 years for laptop and desktop respectively)

I think part of my hanging on to shit for so long relates to my distaste for throwing things out. (Not surprisingly, I'm a historian by education and hobby.) Responsible environmental stewardship entails not tossing printed circuit boards out into the trash where they can eventually become HAZMATs. In today's society, the challenge is to figure out what to do with all that stuff. If electronics recycling was free, more people would do it. This is not to be reductionist and to say that someone should be subsidizing it, but I bet a recycling subsidy might not be a half-bad idea.