Phone home

The lessons I’ve learned from a decade and a half of using a mobile phone are too many to list.

Okay so here they are:

1. Mobile phones may or may not cause brain tumors that may or may not kill you instantly.
2. Mobile phones may or may not cause fatal accidents, but they do cause you to drive like a total moron.
3. Mobile phones are designed to give you first degree burns on your ear and face when you have spent more than thirty minutes bad mouthing someone. It’s phone karma. Sometimes you get burned, other times you get a tumor (See #1).
4. Mobile phones cause rudeness. Traditional greetings have been replaced with: “Hey, what’s up, where are you, what’ya doin’?”
5. Just like Facebook, mobile phones end friendships and, for some, relationships. The chief causes are pocket dialing and not hanging up properly – not the snazzy tracking apps. People that allow their GPS tracking to be viewed by others or published on social networking sites have no friends or relationships. Just kidding. (No I’m not).
6. Sharing your mobile phone number with your office mates as an emergency contact number means that they will only call you when it is not an emergency, only when you are on vacation.
7. Every month you use the same phone, but the bill is always different and $100 more than what you are supposed to pay.
8. The iPhone will effectively turn you into both a hippie and a snob. Hmm. A snippie?
9. You will never cash in on your phone insurance. There’s always a catch.
10. Your mobile phone can get you out of any situation, from using it to call for help or pretending you’re on a call.
11. If your current mobile phone has an antenna that actually comes out of the top of the phone, you are reading this through a dial-up connection.
12. Don’t lend your cell phone to someone you wouldn’t want to press your cheek to.
13. When a phone rings – any phone, any ring, anywhere – even though you are certain it’s not yours, you still check your cell.
14. I have no idea why it’s called a cellular phone. After publishing this, I will look it up, but I’m pretty sure I’ll forget it by the time my phone rings.
15. If you have a company issued mobile, every month your accounting department will yell at you for over-usage and, at the same time, your boss will frown at you for your under-usage. Go ahead, try to drop it, wet it, lose it and burn it. It won’t work. The IT department will replace it before that first degree burn on your ear and face has a chance to heal.
16. BlackBerry is derived from a word used by native people to express the universal sentiment of “you are screwed.” Look it up when you’re done reading this, if you’re not on dial-up.