I use a flip phone.
My students laugh when they see it. My wife laughed when she saw this model arrive in the mail because it’s very stripped down with big buttons, she said ‘I think they think you’re in your 70s.’ That’s a little unfair because her mom is in her 70s and has a space phone. I briefly had one of the flat phones with a slide out QWERT keyboard which was good for texting - it was my second or third phone, I think, all the others had been flip phones - but it broke. At the time I wanted the phone company to provide me a new phone because I felt like I knew a lot of people whose phone companies were getting them new phones and I am cheap. They said no so I got a cheap pay as you go phones for twenty bucks and swapped the chip. When it broke, I did it again, and again, and again, etc, for however long. After while they changed the phones and I can’t do that anymore, and the cheapest phone is like forty bucks instead of twenty. I like the constraints of it, and I sort of like being a curmudgeosaur who dislikes the very idea of trying to understand and successfully navigate this section of the world. I’ve gotten lots of great sweaters this year (three, I think, which is a metric lot, I believe) but they’re less old man looking than they could be, I should try to play up an old man style. I should do a lot of things.The flip phone is not capable of apps and whatnot and at my work they’ve pushed out a multi-factor authentication that requires an app on your phone. I’m not buying an expensive phone of a type I actively don’t want, and giving up a phone of a type I like, for this. I mean, I suppose if I truly have to I will, but I think I’ll make them make me and I’ll be salty about it. (I’m still annoyed about our paycut in 2020 or so and the cut to retirement contribution that year which is another form of paycut, and when the year ended they talked about how well the budget had done in a smiling tone!) I wrote to tech support about the issue and they basically said ‘reset your settings, delete your contact info from the support page then re-enter it, that’s a workaround’ which is funny and speaks to the sort of duct-tape-and-chicken-wire quality of a lot stuff right now. I did that for a while and worked fine and then yesterday it didn’t and I spent about twenty minutes trying to get access to a part of the web site I needed before it finally worked. Very annoying. I wanted to try to make a joke about it but now the ten minutes is up. No time for laughs, must stick to the work-crowded schedule!
On an up note I had a full english breakfast this morning and made toast and egg for the youngest as well. That was nice. She told me two jokes. (‘Want to hear a joke?’ ‘Of course!’) The first was ‘what do you call someone lovely who laughs? laughly’ and the second was ‘if you laugh while stirring soup that’s laughstir.’ Five years old and already funnier than me. Generational progress.
