What have we become

In the fall of 1998, I was living in a rented house in a mediocre part of the city of Trenton, NJ. One of my sisters was living not too far from Camden, NJ and the other was living in southern New Jersey and driving regularly into and out of Philadelphia. All three of us were driving the scary piles of scrap metal that seem to qualify as cars when you are young and broke and living in rented space. My parents wisely decided that it would be a good idea if we all had cell phones.

These first phones were about six inches long. There was no way to collapse the long rubber antenna. Even if I had carried a purse, this thing never would have fit inside. I left it home a lot.

Every minute of air time used was charged. It was safer to leave the thing off and pray no one called.

I think in a full year, I made two phone calls from it and recieved another two.

When my unreliable pile of rust broke down one night on a particularly empty stretch of route 29 near Washington's Crossing, I had to walk to a seedy roadside garage to phone for help, because I had left the monstrosity at home.

Two years later, living in Cincinnati, I upgraded to a "sleeker" Nokia phone. It still didn't fold or collpse. It was still about four and a half inches long. It had propensity for dialing other phones without me telling it to.

As of tonight, I'm on my third phone since the haunted one. It's a sleek little LG phone with a sleek little name, Chocolate. It slides up in two pieces and does more things faster than the Apple IIGS my parents spent a lot of money on in 1988.

I'm pretty sure this sleek little black box could launch a satellite if I could just find the correct menu.