Hot dang! FINALLY I seem to have found a cell I can a) afford and b) operate without needing a master’s degree in engineering and special equipment to dial a phone number.
Saturday I dropped by a nearby Radio Shack to pick up batteries for a couple of walk-around extensions to the land-line. The phone that resides in a cabinet shelf near the floor, where I can reach it should I break a hip the next time I fall on the tile, had about gone dry, and the kitchen phone had keeled over dead.
Radio Shack, as you’ve probably heard, is a moribund corporation, another of the best features of twentieth-century American commerce about to go away. Only one other customer was in the store, and the sole sales clerk was waiting on him. That was fine: it gave me a chance to browse all the strange and silly objects Radio Shack sells. Some of this stuff is great fun, and I’ve found they often undersell the competition on the same brands of Chinese import electronics. Ah…the doorbell thingie that rings when someone opens the door, thereby letting you know when your customer enters or your kid exits! Oh…the 37 berjillion little jackets you can put on your cell phone. Eeeeh…the array of colorful funny-looking Bluetooth speakers… And on and on.
Naturally, I perused the vast array of cell phones they offer, all the while thinking, “But I don’t want to carry a tiny computer around with me! All I want to do is be able to call the roadside service if my car craps out on the freeway.”
Eventually the other guy left and I purchased the batteries. In passing, I asked the sales dude, “Do they make a cell phone that all it does is make phone calls? I don’t need anything more than that.”
The kid recognized a doddering old bat when he saw her. “You want a phone for emergencies only, right?”
“Yeah. That tank out there is almost 15 years old, and sooner or later it’s going to fall apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.”
“Have we got a phone for you!”
Radio Shack carries TracFone gadgets, and lo! They had a totally dumbed-down flip phone for LESS THAN TWENTY BUCKS! It has real buttons — not stupid virtual buttons that won’t respond to your fingertip and that you have to punch with a stylus, if you can see the damn things, if you can figure out how to get them to come up. And the real buttons are large enough to fit your fingers and for your eyes to make out the numbers on the damn things.
Its main function is to make phone calls. But it also will send texts — convenient, since my son thinks it’s rude to telephone people and, unless the call is made by ER personnel on the hospital’s phone system, will generally respond only to texts. And it even has a little camera on it. Apparently it will download and play music, too, which it will kindly play through Bluetooth speakers.
For another $20, you get 120 minutes or 3 months’ worth of air time, whichever comes first. That, compared to the $35/month I was paying T-Mobile for nothing, is quite the little bargain.
I was tempted to ogle another cheap phone that had more features (momentarily forgetting, in my enchantment, that I can’t figure out how to operate those features…). Amazingly, the guy did not try to upsell me! To the contrary, he insisted that since an emergency phone was what I wanted, the cheaper model and plan were what was needed.
So. Now if the Dog Chariot craps out, I can call the roadside rescue service from the side of the road. 🙂
Congrats on the Tracfone purchase, it’s probably the same LG flip phone that I use. I also just wanted an emergency phone, nothing fancy or complicated. It really came in handy a couple of weeks ago when the landline was out of commission and I had phone calls that I needed to make.
Ya, if you only need to make calls get one of the cheap ones.
To be honest I couldn’t live without my Galaxy.
I recently made a road trip to Tucson to visit an old high school friend (another long story), but me being a world traveler I didn’t bring a map to travel those 468 miles. I just knew I had to go south.
Phoenix should be teleported to some other planet. The roads must have been layed out by a committee of morons or maybe they just paved over where horses or mules walked in the 19th century.
A couple swipes on my phone and I had a map in front of me, the GPS was on and the voice said ‘Turn left off of 60 and make the turn on to I-17, look for the sign’ and then the phone gave me a dope slap.
Now I am guilty of not planning, I have AAA and I could have ordered an entire map kit from them, a Trip-Tik it’s called. Flip the pages and follow the little arrows.
Anyway it was a good trip, met an old girlfriend whose mother labeled me ‘The Wild Man on the Horizon’ during my last year in High School when I and the now 64 year old lady were getting, you know kinda close, her mom sent her to Switzerland for boarding school to be an educated lady. That’s an entire novel, not even a long story.
It was a wonderful reunion after 48 years and you know, you remember that first kiss from half a century ago and it was just as good now as it was then.
When we get older we age, our body’s change, we get bald and perhaps fat but I tell you what you feel in your heart even after decades remains. You never loose that feeling.
How fun, to meet an old flame after all these years! “Oh, my friend, we’re older but no wiser / And in our hearts we still are just the same…”
Actually, Phoenix IS another planet. Didn’t you notice when you passed in and out of the Warp? Those kinda wavy lines on the highway???
Gosh, does AAA still do TripTiks? On paper?
Actually, Phoenix was laid out by Mormons. Hence the grid pattern, which actually is pretty easy to navigate once you realize how it was originally designed. Tucson, on the other hand: now there’s another world! 🙂
Yes. My girl who had been taken away by her mom decades ago sent to Sweden to study things, and yes she speaks French.
I got to see her , feel her touch her and yes I’m as crazy as a loon.
But older and wiser
On the other paw or hoof. We had T-Mo for years and I’d like to say categorically that they bite rocks.
No bars on some days, and then all the voice mails and texts would come in every other day.
Kinda like getting mail for the USPS when you live 60 miles from no where and 6 feet from hell. They only deliver when they have a truck load.
T-Mobile was MAJORLY sucky! The phone was inscrutable, and they actually worked at making it hard to pay your bill. Whaa?
Sometimes you wonder how businesses manage to stay in business.
Congrats on your “phone find”. DW and I switched to “pay as you go” over 10 years ago and it cost me $80 a year for service. The phone I use is one the wife disgarded when she “upgraded” and is perfect. It’s a “flip phone” and my hope is to one day donate it to the Smithsonian. I’m not saying it’s old but recently I was shopping for a battery on line and several sites shared that the battery is …”no longer available”. Two biggest changes/expenses in rental applicants I have noticed are student loan debt and cell phone bills. I have seen monthly cell phone bills approach $200 per month…
Kudos to you for recognizing that. My mother cannot operate smartphones, and all she does is make phone calls. Yet she insists on having a “cool iphone” that she can’t even message on, nor use the photo feature. Not to mention the additional $60/mo tag. I had a flip phone while in college and it didn’t kill me. It was a Verizon LG phone (whatever came before the LG Chocolate, which I lusted over). Had a basic camera, texting, and most importantly, phone calls. Now I have a Blackberry, and though it doesn’t have all the belts and whistles of a mini computer phone, it handles my email and IM’ing, which is all I really want.
My 89 year old Mother-in-Law has gone to a pay as you go cell phone for making calls, she still has her land line as do we.
I like having a land line, for those “just in case”, hopefully won’t ever happen incidents, but I have a cell phone with at&t. $39+ a month for only calling – maybe I will rethink the whole pay as you go, but I don’t use it enough to use the paid minutes, so it seems I would not be much better off.
Glad you still use Radio Shack and found what you needed and had a good salesman who didn’t give you a run around!