Stop Selling Me (Mormon Lobsters, Pt. II)

^ -- Thing I will not be purchasing.

 Thanks to yesterday's post about my Mustang-fueled trip to Mississippi, I now have a subtle ad across the top of my gmail account for "certified pre-owned Fords."

It's happening again. My frustration with being sold things is rising. Today, I had to walk into the Apple Store to get a new computer. The argument started in my head on the way to the mall.

"I don't need an iPhone," I imagined myself telling a salesperson. "I sit in front of a computer 95 percent of the time that I'm not exercising or driving my car."

Then I get on a roll.

"If it's not personal laptop, it's my Mac at work. So, explain to me what I could possibly need a smart phone for? It's harder to text and drive at the same time, not that I do or would do that. They break easier, cost more and emit more radiation (which, let's face it, can NOT be good)."

The iPhone. Everybody else seems to have them so they must be worthy. I guess the same argument could be made against buying an iPad. If you're around a computer all day, and especially if you have an iPhone, it seems like duplicative technology to me.

I remember using my parents' first
cell phone, the first of two they
have ever owned.

And then I considered purchasing an iPhone. Perhaps I just like arguing with people. Maybe I can find those Mormon missionaries again and slug it out with them over my version (NLV) of the Bible versus their's (King James, perhaps an edited version).


Thing is, I'm turning into my parents. There it is, in print, just for my Mom. Throughout the 1980s and perhaps even the early 1990s, my parents refused to pay for touch-tone dialing. There was no bonus, as my parents saw it, to having touch tones, and it's not like it costs the phone company anything extra to provide that service.

Eventually, they got free touch tones.

They have also never paid specifically for voice mail. When they switched to Vonage a few years ago, to save money, it was the first time in their adult lives they had voice mail.

And now they are in Duluth, spending their summer in a college dorm and watching ships float out of and into Lake Superior. The school stopped giving them a free phone line to use for the summer. That means another first: They are actually using their cell phone, which is literally from 1999. I never include the word literally when I write because it should be given that what you're writing is a fact. However, in this case, the year 1999 is so absurd that "literally" needs to be included.

People change their opinions and evolve. Everybody is a curmudgeon about something. And, perhaps sadly, I am more like my parents than I would like to admit. Because I'm not buying an iPhone and I'm sure as hell not buying a Ford Mustang. Nice try, Google.