phone flavored phones.
(or, cell phones, again.)
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My contract with my old cell phone carrier finally
expired, so my wife and I signed up for a joint plan to save money. Seems
reasonable, right? So, here’s
the first problem: I work in a facility where cameras aren’t allowed,
including ones embedded in cell phones.
This is not such a rare policy; pretty much any defense contractor or
secure government facility has the same rule, so it affects more people than
you might think. So of course these days
it’s almost impossible to find a cell phone that doesn’t have a
camera embedded in it. Our carrier had
exactly one model without a camera, the most basic, cheap-o, entry-level
Nokia that was included with the calling plan at no extra cost. The phone doesn’t flip open, so you
have to lock the keys when you put it in your pocket or bag, and it’s tiny.
It barely stretches from my ear to my cheek, which makes it awkward to
hold while I’m making a call. It
has these little itty bitty keys, and it’s easy to bump an adjacent key
by mistake. The whole phone itself
feels like a cheap toy that you might get out of a candy machine. In contrast, my wife got a slick new
Samsung flip phone with a sweet display, big buttons, and a two megapixel camera.
It’s about the same thickness and length as mine, but it’s
wider, and when it flips open it fits your head and hand like a real
phone. Not that I’m jealous or
anything. Here’s another problem with both the cell phones
I’ve had: I get the feeling the entire phone is engineered by marketers
to sell me stuff I don’t want.
There are all these sub-menus for services like text messaging and web
browsing and voice-activated operation and ring tones and games and who knows
what else, and I keep accessing them by accident because the phone keys are
so damn small or because I forgot to lock the keypad before putting the phone
in my pocket. I seriously believe that
the thing is intentionally designed to make more money for the phone company
by making it easy for keys to be bumped by mistake. Like Dennis Leary’s famous
coffee-flavored coffee, is it impossible to get a cell phone that just lets
me make calls? Is that too much to
ask? Let me show you how simple this is. Here are my requirements: - Basic point-to-point connectivity - Call waiting - Voice mail - Keys that are big enough to push with my index finger Here are my nice-to-have features: - Speed dial - Phone book That’s it. That’s
everything I want and/or need in a cell phone. I don’t want all this extra stuff that’s crammed in by the software
guys, and I don’t want to
navigate a half dozen submenus to figure out how to get my phone out of
whatever random mode it’s gotten stuck in because the keys or the side
buttons got pushed accidentally. All I
really want is something one step ahead of an old rotary phone connected to
an answering machine. While we were waiting for the manager at the cell phone
store to finish our paperwork, an old man came in. Turns out the guy had bought a phone from
Radio Shack, but it was too complicated to use, and for some reason they sent
him over to this store, maybe to see if he could exchange it for a simpler
model. To make it worse, it turns out
the guy had just been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s, and he was
worried that even if he could figure
out the phone, in a year or two he wouldn’t be able to use it. The people at the store tried to help him,
but when we left they were still trying to explain to him how to make a basic
phone call, and somehow he couldn’t grasp whatever it was they wanted
him to do in step four. Upon further
reflection, this strikes me as a bit absurd: why should you ever need four or
more steps to make a phone call? Step
one: turn on phone. Step two: dial
number. Step three: push send. (Note
this is one more step than was needed in the old days with a regular old land
line.) How could they possibly get to
step four? Memo to cell phone companies: wake up and smell the maple
nut crunch. |