My New Love Affair

On Monday of this week, I fell desperately in love. I haven't felt quite this way in a long time; it might actually have been more than 9 or 10 years. I'm having a hard time sleeping and I'm not eating as much as I'd like--two signs that I've lost my emotional equilibrium and also a testament to the height of my excitement. Granted, I've been attracted since June, and I actually had an inkling that this was going to happen on Saturday, but I remained optimistic that I'd keep my cool. After all, I'm not exactly a teenager. I'm a relatively mature adult who prides herself on her self-awareness. I assured myself that I could remain aloof when presented with a slim, attractive package. Well, that was not to be. By the end of Monday, I was an absolute goner. I've spent most of today contemplating the depth of my feelings and trying to get the perfect photograph of my new love. Unfortunately, I'm a horrible photographer who is unable to capture the essence of my subjects, but I'm sharing the photo anyway:

Shocking, isn't it? I don't know exactly how I came to be in this emotional state. Granted, it's true that I absolutely love almost anything to do with computers, along with other super technological advances like MP3 recordings, touch screens at the ATM machine, HDTV, XM and HD radio, and supermarket self checkout; however, the mostly recessive Luddite gene that I inherited from my father has basically reared its ugly head when it comes to the matter of mobile phones.

I first got a mobile phone in 2002 and was kind of excited about it, until I had to close the account because my older daughter ran up more than $300 in charges when I left it and her in a hotel room in New Orleans. At that time, I only had one job and the paychecks only came sporadically, so there was no way I could afford that bill. Also, at that time, "roaming charges" of $4.00 a minute were applied to any call I made that wasn't to my next door neighbor and I rarely saw a cell phone bill that looked anything like the plan they said I bought.

Not long after that, my boss sent me a Siemens phone to use to take Help Desk calls, and for weeks it confounded me. There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to the settings on the phone. My boss berated me for not recording a voice mail greeting 5 seconds after I unpacked it, and I was too ashamed to tell him that I couldn't figure out how to turn the wretched thing on, let alone record a voice mail on it. So, I made up some now-forgotten lame excuse as to why I hadn't recorded the voice mail and then had to spend about two weeks pressing every button possible before I figured out how to use it.

After about a year, the Siemens phone and I had settled into a slightly uneasy truce. So, what did my boss do? He shut that phone off and sent me a Blackberry for a birthday present. I actually mastered that Blackberry fairly quickly, mostly because he had already set it up for me. Unfortunately, a cat (yes, that would be one of my lovely office assistants) knocked a glass of water on top of it and completely fried it. So, I ordered another one that I thought would be as much like that one as possible, but alas, it wasn't. I hated that Blackberry. It refused to do anything it was supposed to do like receive my business e-mails despite all my calls to the AT&T un-help desks. And, without the mail box set up, it wouldn't show me any information about my received or dialed calls. The keyboard was ornery and after the warranty expired, the charger only worked when the stars and planets were aligned perfectly. After several months of frustration, I finally just forwarded all its calls to my little personal Motorola mobile phone and quit using it.

My Motorola isn't a bad little phone, but you still either have to have a master's degree in engineering or a birthdate sometime after 1987 to figure out how to forward your phone calls or change your ringtone on it, and I majored in radio, television, and motion pictures and was definitely born well before 1987. My daughter Anna used it for a little while when hers was lost and she did some thoughtful things with it, such as assign photographs to some of the numbers in my address book so that I see that person's face when the phone rings. I don't know how she did that--it's all I can do to send a text message or add a phone number to the address book. Most of the time, I fight with the phone because the former Cingular and the new AT&T ("less bars in more places") seem to have mandated to cellphone manufacturers that your phone default menu setting is one that will send you to the World Wide Web, especially if you don't have a Web plan, which means that you pay something like $5.00 per byte downloaded.

Well, on Monday, as I said, all that changed. My boss called me on Saturday to tell me that my new iPhone was on its way. I was beyond excited; I've been hearing about the iPhone for a year, because part of my love of technology includes reading everything I can get my hands on about the latest gadgets. For some reason, I just had a feeling that the iPhone would be the right phone for me. Maybe it was because I had heard that Apple was marketing the iPhone to a female demographic--one that wanted something friendlier and less arcane than your standard Envy or Palm Treo. I personally liked the idea of something that didn't need a stylus because an attachment like that is a recipe for disaster if it comes my way. In my world, styluses get stuck in the side of the phone or fall into the toilet. If neither of those things occurs, they disappear into a pocket book, along with the 4,776,233 pens that have been sucked up by the black holes that are every purse that I own.

Even when the iPhone arrived, I was worried that it would take me two days of solid studying of a tiny but extremely dense manual, which is what usually accompanies my cell phones, to determine how to answer a phone call or record my voicemail. My experiences with such manuals is that they usually begin with a message congratulating me on being such a brilliant consumer because I now own their phone, launch into dire warnings about what might happen if I drop the device and its plug in the bathwater while I'm talking, and then spend about 8 pages telling me that the device won't work if I leave it in the box and showing diagrams of how to get it out of the box.

When I unpacked the iPhone, I had a moment of panic. There was only a small booklet and then a nice note telling me to hook it up to iTunes and where to get iTunes if I didn't already have it. Since I already have iTunes on this laptop, hooking it up was easy (okay, there was a slight issue with the activation of my SIM card, but my boss handled that for me). After the iPhone charged, I turned it on and figured out how to do everything on it in about 15 minutes. I'm not kidding. It was that easy. By the end of Monday, I had picked a bluesy ringtone, set it up to receive work e-mails and e-mails from my personal AOL account, took pictures and used one for my wallpaper, sent a text message to Peru, and made a bunch of calls, mainly to people informing them that I have an iPhone. This is because the designers of the iPhone actually understand the language that most of us speak and have used icons that look like the functions behind them and settings that are helpfully called "ringtones" and "photos" rather than "sound" and "multimedia." I can tap the Safari button and be on the Web instantly and if I can't read what's on the screen, I can turn it sideways and the picture adjusts.

I have even done something completely uncharacteristic--I ordered a bluetooth headset for it and that arrived today. It's charging and I'm hoping to try it out before the day is out. The only thing I'm not doing is taking it out of the house--not until I receive the case I ordered for it. As prone as I am to dropping things or getting them wet (even in a drought), I'm not risking the life of this baby until I know it's safe.