When Hardi talked about getting cell phones, I thought he had lost his mind. My only frame of reference was the pagers he and I had been required to carry in the past, and I had no interest in either of us being THAT on-call. Nuh-UH, no way, nohow!

But when he got his, as he used it I began to see that it was going to be a useful tool under OUR control, and that it was actually much more like the email I had come to know and love. We don't use them to be on call; we don't talk on them while walking down the street; we don't use them to interrupt busy people on THEIR cell phones.

We joke about it now, because at first I was all for email and Hardi didn't want to learn how to use it. Now he's become quite the email correspondent, and I'm becoming quite the cellphone user myself.


So I wondered-- have others found ways in which you use your cell phone differently from how you thought you would, when you got it? What do you NOT do with it, that "kids today" do with theirs?

For instance, we DON'T text-message, email, or take pix with ours. We leave them in silent mode most of the time and check for messages only when we have time to actually have a conversation appropriate to the work we do (our outgoing messages indicate calls will be returned LATER). We use them to find each other in big stores, or when one of us is at the pool and the other is road cycling, to see if we're ready to finish up and where to meet. We use them a LOT as alarm clocks, because we have three different master bedrooms on this property as well as frequent overnight trips for work. We use them to order takeout we are on our way to pick up on the long drives our area requires. I'm going to use mine for driving directions I leave myself that I can retrieve in voicemail, the same way I use my MP3 player sometimes. Hardi likes a belt holster for his; mine is usually in a pocket. Hardi's has more features and is new, since he got started first; mine is his old one since that's the one I learned to use by borrowing his and thus he knows ALL it's features in case I have a question. Hardi checks messages often, between appointments, and once again as he leaves the church. He and uses the drive-time home to return most calls and once he's home, he's HOME and not on the phone all evening. I batch my messages for breaktime in the midst of chores or other activities.

You?

~Susan