We used to make fun of them, walking around with our hands up to our ears, too, pretending to be on the phone. Somewhere, I saw a picture or drawing of a group of teen girls at a bus stop, each one of them pawing through a purse, in case the ring tone they could hear was their phone ringing.
I don't make fun now. I still want my cell phone to fit safely and unobtrusively in my pocket, which isn't very big. I want a phone I can hear when it rings, that is not too expensive and that I can hear when speaking to someone on it. I don't need internet connectivity.
I am guessing that we have saved maybe an hour or two over the last year calling each other in a mall to get back together after separate shopping. That kind of call is our most frequent, followed by a call home to ask what was on the grocery list that was forgotten by mistake. The truth is that we don't use our phones much. Our company wrote to us that we rarely use the monthly minutes we have and invited us to use a pay-as-you-go plan. We tried and found that that plan offered poor coverage to towers and we often could not get a signal. We switched back to our original deal.
We have had very few dropped calls in the 7 or 8 years we have had phones. In our neck of the woods, we wanted good coverage in the winter to be able to call for help if we had a car breakdown in bad weather or dangerous cold. So far, we do not have a law in our area that forbids use of a phone while driving. I do believe that research shows it is dangerous to do so and and the idea of texting while on the phone seems totally crazy.
