Entry tags:
Today's Keyboard Smash
Well, they finally got me, friends. I have been bullied, cajoled, harassed, and threatened into obtaining a smartphone. I've got fucking Google devices littered around the house now. They keep prompting me to log in to my account. I don't know how to explain to them the degree to which one desktop computer and one tablet are MORE THAN ENOUGH ACCESS TO ME.
So the deal is, I previously had a sturdy, workman-style rubberized flip phone. It was, in a technical sense, internet-enabled, in that there was a browser programmed into it. The browser never once successfully loaded a webpage, though, so it was more of a theoretical thing, you know? That's the sort of phone that worked for the three of us: basic, tough, capable of being run over by a pickup truck and surviving the experience. (Ask us how we know.) My phone was an embarrassment to any normal person who saw it, and thus a point of belligerent pride for me.
I neither wanted nor needed a smartphone. Not to channel![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ysabetwordsmith, but just because a technology is new, doesn't mean it's good. I don't automatically adopt every new piece of tech just on general principle, and I resent the hell out of being made to do so anyway. A portable phone? Yeah, sure, good. I work and have elderly parents; I want to be able to contact them. A smartphone? Fuck right off into the sea.
My phone carrier a) got bought out by another company and promptly b) announced my phone model was too old for their new system. After the first of the year, they are going to essentially brick it: it won't even be capable of making emergency calls, which normally phones can do even if you haven't paid the bill, don't have service, and have been transported to Mars. So we have to upgrade.
This is not unprecedented. Every time we have upgraded our phones, it has been at a sort of gunpoint. Upgrade, or no more service for you. We, uh, we aren't exactly out here waiting in line for the newest model of iPhone, see? The last time we upgraded, it was a huge fiasco, because the old phones were so old, they couldn't even communicate with the new ones to transfer contacts and whatnot. One of them only had a built-in SIM card, so you couldn't even take it out and put it in something new or a reader.
So now, they've made it so the only phone models available are smartphones. Touch screens. Do you know what I'm going to go through to teach my nearly 90-year-old father to use a touch screen for the first time? Do you understand what that does to a person, trying to explain swipe controls to someone who predates the Second World War?
But it was all this or try to switch to a different service entirely. Find someone who offers flip phones for old (at heart) people. In addition to the hassle of finding such a thing, we also then have to hope that a smaller service like that will get, you know, SERVICE out in the sticks where we live. We have problems with that as it is. Plus, we would likely need to get new phone numbers, which poses its own host of switch-over problems. So. I have, reluctantly, identified this upgrade as the lesser of many evils.
Very, very reluctantly.
So I spent the morning getting three phones activated, contacts and photos transferred over, and settings wrangled. This after a 50+ hour work week, when I really quite needed to get a bunch of writing done. Also, cleaned the ducks' run in there for a couple hours. So it has been a less than satisfactory day.
I have to figure out where I'm going to charge this, this...device, because I don't want it in my room. The tablet can spy on me--gods know I've resigned myself to that--but the phone has to sit in the corner and think about its life choices. I, sadly, will be over in another corner, doing the exact same thing.
So the deal is, I previously had a sturdy, workman-style rubberized flip phone. It was, in a technical sense, internet-enabled, in that there was a browser programmed into it. The browser never once successfully loaded a webpage, though, so it was more of a theoretical thing, you know? That's the sort of phone that worked for the three of us: basic, tough, capable of being run over by a pickup truck and surviving the experience. (Ask us how we know.) My phone was an embarrassment to any normal person who saw it, and thus a point of belligerent pride for me.
I neither wanted nor needed a smartphone. Not to channel
ysabetwordsmith, but just because a technology is new, doesn't mean it's good. I don't automatically adopt every new piece of tech just on general principle, and I resent the hell out of being made to do so anyway. A portable phone? Yeah, sure, good. I work and have elderly parents; I want to be able to contact them. A smartphone? Fuck right off into the sea.My phone carrier a) got bought out by another company and promptly b) announced my phone model was too old for their new system. After the first of the year, they are going to essentially brick it: it won't even be capable of making emergency calls, which normally phones can do even if you haven't paid the bill, don't have service, and have been transported to Mars. So we have to upgrade.
This is not unprecedented. Every time we have upgraded our phones, it has been at a sort of gunpoint. Upgrade, or no more service for you. We, uh, we aren't exactly out here waiting in line for the newest model of iPhone, see? The last time we upgraded, it was a huge fiasco, because the old phones were so old, they couldn't even communicate with the new ones to transfer contacts and whatnot. One of them only had a built-in SIM card, so you couldn't even take it out and put it in something new or a reader.
So now, they've made it so the only phone models available are smartphones. Touch screens. Do you know what I'm going to go through to teach my nearly 90-year-old father to use a touch screen for the first time? Do you understand what that does to a person, trying to explain swipe controls to someone who predates the Second World War?
But it was all this or try to switch to a different service entirely. Find someone who offers flip phones for old (at heart) people. In addition to the hassle of finding such a thing, we also then have to hope that a smaller service like that will get, you know, SERVICE out in the sticks where we live. We have problems with that as it is. Plus, we would likely need to get new phone numbers, which poses its own host of switch-over problems. So. I have, reluctantly, identified this upgrade as the lesser of many evils.
Very, very reluctantly.
So I spent the morning getting three phones activated, contacts and photos transferred over, and settings wrangled. This after a 50+ hour work week, when I really quite needed to get a bunch of writing done. Also, cleaned the ducks' run in there for a couple hours. So it has been a less than satisfactory day.
I have to figure out where I'm going to charge this, this...device, because I don't want it in my room. The tablet can spy on me--gods know I've resigned myself to that--but the phone has to sit in the corner and think about its life choices. I, sadly, will be over in another corner, doing the exact same thing.
