Tag Archives: old fart

Playing/paying telephone…

I am somewhat resistant to change in general – the big life ones, not the truly beneficial ones – but especially if it costs more.

I still don’t own a smartphone or use a cell phone on a regular basis.

But my landline has been sketchy since a batch of thunderstorms a couple weeks ago, and along with it, my DSL (yes, I’m in the sticks and refuse to buy cable). So I’ve had intermittent service, and just when I think all is well, I realize I blew the only good 10 minutes of connectivity of the day reading ravelry forums and dicking around on my Instagram with my non-phone tablet.

My cellphone is a pre-paid thing that costs less than $10 a month, and I’ve had it for so long and use it so little that I’ve built up thousands of minutes (good thing for when my landline craps out). The company recently sent me a new flip phone because the one I had became obsolete. I hate the new phone – I have to charge it more than once a week and I never remember to do it. It has more options I’ll never use and a color screen I don’t need and all I want to do is make a call if I absolutely have to or get the occasional text if I’m expecting it (or traveling) and I’ll go days without looking at the thing.

Wiping out the old phone was interesting – the camera was entirely shit, so I only used it if I saw a floor pattern I liked…

Hex - phone

(first appeared in this post)

telephone-nm

…or to send a pic to N if I was traveling without him.

But it’s off to a donation site as well as an international one that only worked for the two weeks I needed it for initially, but not for the next two weeks that were supposed to justify its purchase…

Since 1996, I’ve owned 5 cell phones – all discarded due to obsolescence (I know this number is remarkably low) but I still have a rotary dial phone since then that was already several decades old, and still works fine – nay, it sounds way better than all cell phones now. (I do have another button phone for calls involving menus though).

But I should keep this post short since I may loose it and I was going to go into a full-on rant, but the gist is we’re creating so much garbage with these cell phones, toxic garbage, and though we can think we’re donating and recycling them, they’ve still been manufactured (by polluting facilities and exploited labor) and they’ll still reduce to some unreusable parts.

And they essentially run on coal.

(Unless your electric supplier is clean and green).

Old landline phones don’t use electricity.

And “regular” cell phone plans are needlessly expensive in the states.

 

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Filed under recycling, travel

On getting rid of things (likely a series, so part I – print dictionaries)…

Will I need to be able to spell during the apocalypse?

Will I need a little-used sly synonym to endear myself to others before I shank them for some shoe leather?

dictionary-thesaurus

I’ve been carting around these two beasts since my high school graduation (I think that’s when I got them?) but haven’t cracked them open in at least 15 years since grad school, though it doesn’t look like I used them much then either…

I love old dictionaries – especially with tiny illustrations – but not my old dictionary, though it does have a few pictures.

dictionary-slowworm

But it doesn’t have some everyday words like internet.

(which is weird since it existed then, just among a more select few…)

I don’t care that I’m missing jeggings or glamping (hah! wordpress ain’t got ’em either…) or terms like “hot mess,” but will I miss the actual book?

Will I miss being able to pull it off the shelf on a rainy day, opening it at random…

dictionary-alembic

…and saying, hey, I thought that thing was just called a still?

But then almost immediately forget what I just learned?

Will I lose out on a princely sum not being able to prove a Scrabble play during a power outage?

Will I miss out-dated or somewhat offensive descriptions like:

Runt – 1. an undersized animal, especially the smallest animal of the litter. 2. A person of small stature?

(Definition #2 is listed as derogatory at least in some online dictionaries now…)

dictionary-runcible

Will I miss turning to the runcible spoon and thinking about how it’s like the ancestor of the spork and remembering when we had those crappy sporks in high school that always snapped before the tastiest bit made it to your gob, and all of us cool kids called them sfoons?

Will all of my oversize documents and rugs begin to curl with abandon with nothing left to weight them down?

Will I need a boost to see over the steering wheel when my elderly bones shrink and curve into themselves?

dictionary-tongs

Maybe I just need a pair of lazy tongs to grab things to put in the charity bin to prevent me from opening/touching/examining/experiencing them again…

How about you (especially you writerly few) have you kept your dictionaries?

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Filed under collecting, home