On My First New Phone in Five Years...

I know exactly when I bought my hot pink Motorola Razr (May 21, 2006) because (shocker) I put up a blog about it the next day.  (It's worth the effort to click on that link just to read the comment exchange between Susie and me.)

When I walked into the AT&T store yesterday afternoon, the woman who waited on me said, "WOW, a RAZR!" the way an ornithologist might say, "WOW, an IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER!"  Razrs are reportedly extinct, so it is a lucky, lucky cell phone store employee who runs across one in the wild.

Two years ago, a year past my upgrade date, I bought an LG Neon in an attempt to update my image.  Unfortunately, the LG Neon was the shittiest piece of shit phone I'd ever laid hands on, and after a trip back to the store and two hour-long conversations with customer service (which took place on the Razr because the Neon kept dropping calls), the verdict was that AT&T was not going to let me switch to a different phone.

And rather than give them another cent of my money, I said, "Fuck it, I'm going back to my Razr."

That was two years ago. 

Two years of getting crap about still having a Razr.

1.  "Can that phone get text messages?"

2.  "Wow, that's an old phone."

3.  "I haven't seen one of those in years!"

4.  "You weren't kidding about being unemployed, were you?"

(And those are just off the top of my head from the past three months.)

I actually did have an upgrade available about six months ago, but my brother stole it out from under me just because he was "moving to New York" and "needed to communicate with family" or whatever.  Jesus.

Then I thought I was going to get a new phone last month off my mom's upgrade.  But her upgrade was for February 2012, which I only realized the day before I was planning to buy the phone.

But yesterday, stealing my brother's upgrade, which he stole from me, which he really stole from my dad, I purchased a Pentach Laser, which is mostly touchscreen, but also has a full keyboard because the nice saleslady told me that switching from a Razr to a touchscreen keyboard might be overly ambitious of me.  ("Save the touchscreen keyboard until you get used to texting that way," she advised me.) 

So far, my only complaints are that I can't customize ringtones for individual callers and the scrolling is a little awkward.  But what an upgrade, right?

RIGHT?!

I could count on one hand the number of calls my Razr dropped in half a decade.  It still had four to six days' worth of battery life after five years.  And it was pink!

And this is....

...a phone that looks like all the other phones.  Because that what all phones are like nowadays.  Such mixed feelings...