The Keys to My Phone

Yesterday I discovered that I had 459 photographs of my keys on my cell phone.

I kid you not. Four hundred. And fifty-nine. One fewer than 460. Roughly three photographs of my keys for every day I have had this phone. They were well-documented keys, is what I’m saying. If my keys had gone missing, I could have supplied an entire dairy’s worth of milk-carton pictures.

And they said technology would never benefit us.

My continuing battles with cell phones have been documented here before. Basically, I am a person who does not find them useful or desirable, and they are sneaky, unreliable, backstabbing little monsters. This combination does not bode well.

But you have to have one of these things in This Modern World, sad to say, otherwise the sky will fall in, the seas will boil away to nothing, the earth will spiral into the sun (or Mars, scientists differ on this) and telecommunications stock prices will decline by as much as an eighth of a point, much to the horrors of industry leaders.

So I got one.

I’ve had it for about six months now, and at 20 cents/minute for every call I make or receive, I’ve spent a little over $32 in that period. I’ve even managed to figure out how to block incoming texts, which neatly removed that problem as well.

But I couldn’t get one without a camera.

Why not? Why is it so hard to get a telephone that doesn’t take pictures? My camera doesn’t make phone calls, after all. My car does not bake cookies. My alarm clock does not take x-rays. My doorbell does not shoot lasers at political campaign workers (although now that I think about it, that might not be such a bad idea). Why is it so hard to find a phone that just is a phone?

The clerk on the other end of that rant the first time I delivered it just sat there quietly until I wound down and then we proceeded as if nothing had happened. I’m sure they’re used to it by now from people like me. There are probably procedures written down in a binder somewhere that deal with it, down to the very last outcry. For all I know they record them and have an internal office pool for the most deranged rants of the week. Perhaps I won a prize for her. You’d think she’d have let me know.

I ended up with the most stripped-down phone they sold. And it does, in fact, make phone calls, usually. But it also has an array of buttons on the exterior that apparently are positioned just so, in exactly the right places for my keys to bump up against them and force it to take their photos.

I must say I have handsome keys. But that is not the point.

Kim eventually figured out how to delete them all in one fell swoop, and now I have plenty of room on the phone for more.

Because you know there will be more.