Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Call For You

Thanks to Verizon's "New Every Two" deal my wife, Sarah, just got a new cell phone free. Well, free if we extend our contract by two years. Her old phone battery wouldn't hold a charge for more than half an hour of conversation, so it was either a new battery or a new phone.

The new phones were much shinier.

We went to the Verizon store together, since our Family Plan account is in my name, but the choice was all Sarah's. She took one look at all of the techno lust on display and suddenly features she hadn't cared about five minutes previously, such as quality of the built-in camera and music player became important.

She was still looking when I had to leave for a meeting, and she'd settled on a Samsung phone that was an updated version of her old phone: clamshell style, nothing fancy or flashy. When I got home from my meeting there, on the table, was her brand new black cherry (that's the color) LG Chocolate. (Which, oddly, comes in several colors, but not brown.)

It has an iPod-style scroll wheel and lots of flashing red lights, instantly making it the "I just want to hold it for a minute" device of the moment.

I'll admit I went online to see what sort of credit I could get from Verizon towards a new phone, until I remembered that I use my phone for less than 50 minutes a month, don't take photos with it and don't listen to music on it.

Immediately our teenaged daughter, thrilled with her cell phone when she received it as a graduation gift a year ago, realized how old and clunky her phone was. She's been lobbying for a new phone repeatedly ever since, even though my reply has never varied from, "If you want to buy a new cell phone, go ahead."

Today she unveiled her new, Multiple Reasons Why You Should Buy Me a New Cell Phone Strategy. "Look at the screen. It's all scratched. And there's a gap...a gap when it closes. See, it doesn't close tight any more."

And, finally, what she hoped would be the knockout punch: "And it has nail polish on it," pointing to a speck of something. "Nail polish! And it doesn't even match."

Nice try.

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