Technological Tether

With the expiration of my cell phone contract imminent and having nothing better to do yesterday, I sallied forth to look at new phones and associated plans. This was, in effect, the culmination of a few weeks of periodic research into various phones. I've had a Motorola Razr, of which I'd grown fond, over the last two years. Not a moments worth of trouble, not even after accidentally dropping it on a stone street in Sagada, where it bounced along in the shadow of the hanging coffins for what seemed slighlty longer than an eternity. At that point, I was nearly ready to curl up in one of those coffins, and would have done so, but the phone emerged with nothing more than a few very minor scuffs. Such was my fondness of the Razr, I considered sticking with it for two more years. But as with so many things, life gets in the way. More numerous and complex responsibilities required something a bit more comprehensive than the Razr in terms of data access and scheduling and so on. Choices had been narrowed down to either the Palm Centro or the Blackberry Curve and I was leaning towards procuring the former as I had experimented with one recently purchased by a coworker and found it to my liking. All thoughts of the Palm, however, were banished after but a few moments of experimenting with the Blackberry. At that point, there was really no choice and I returned home with the Blackberry in my clutches.

As it turned out, the decision as to which phone was the easy part. Learning its multitue of features and how to navigate around the menus ate up much of the evening and even a part of today. Emotions varied between elation and frustration, which astonishingly sometimes occurred at the same time. But at this point of the trial phase, I'm still very much pleased with the purchase, though in a weird sort of way I have a few reservations as to just how deeply connected I'm going to be. SMS, email, all versions of instant messaging, the Internet, and so on. There is something almost fundamentally wrong about this level of connectivity to the world.