How Did I Become So Technologically Pathetic?

I think it was around my Freshman year of high school when it all began. My grandfather (R.I.P.) was upgrading his beeper and offered me his old one. It was a black pager with the display on top and a big red button to check pages. When I received a beep it was this loud siren like I was being summoned to operate on someone's spleen or head to Broadway and 145th to finally catch that drug dealer we've been after. Either that or Big Sancho had several hundred kilos coming in from the shipyard and if I wanted in, I had to be there pronto.

Whatever it was, my beeper made me official. I changed the case to some ugly maroon looking one and then my clip fell off. That was the worst because you meant NOTHING without a clip coming out of your jeans pocket. I had no real desire to call back anyone that was paging me. I mean, the beep was the important part of it all, really. So then I upgraded to that slide out beeper with the display on the side. It was always fun to secretly check your pages in high school at your locker and be disappointed when you had none because hello, anyone who would actually page you was in class just like you were.

My friends and I would enjoy paging each other from payphones - stuff like 7734 2 06 (Go to hell), 14 (hi), 553l8008 (boobless). Then of course your man of the moment would send 143 (I love you) and you'd send it back. We all understood how exciting it was to get a page, not necessarily a phone call. I didn't actually get a cellphone until around '99. I had some lame one that would only call home...and like, the police. I also had an 800# to call home, so I was fine with payphones. My first cellphone was a Nokia. Not like the Zack Morris brick, but it was up there. Same cellphone number ever since, and Verizon was still my carrier. Then that damn two-way page me song came out. I was back on the beeper's d**k. I got the two-way to the left and LOVED it. Pre-historic Blackberry I say. It was LOVELY. I had my cellphone but meh. What's a cellphone when you have TWO-WAY.

So then the two-way fell off, obviously. I wasn't important enough for that brick BlueBerry that Hov had or even a brick BlackBerry for that matter. I wasn't an investment banker or in IT. I was just out of college about to take on some corporate American gigs before I realized I was meant to starve with my pen and my ipod. Then in '05 I bought a Sidekick 2. I bypassed the first generation and went for the cuter younger brother. That Sidekick 2 and I were in l-o-v-e. Wow. Unreal. So then the Sidekick 2 fell off and I went for the 3. We casually dated. I got too comfortable really even though he wasn't right for me. I bought a Blackberry Curve and then returned it for the SK3 again. Comfort. Settling. I finally switched my cellphone to a Blackberry and then my SK3 was dead to me. I originally had the BlackBerry World phone, but where the hell do I go? The furthest out of the country I travel to is the Bronx and it had no camera (ew); back to the Curve I went. So here I stand. In love with my Blackberry Curve just as this fucking Storm is about to hit and destroy the village of love I have built around my precious Curve.

I am about 15 years deep in the mobile technology game, starting with my beeper. I weathered the cellphone storm, complete with cute ringtones and that God awful stick-on bling. I had a charm hanging from that brain radiating antenna until I remembered that I am a grown-ass woman and shouldn't have a bedazzled bee dangling from my ear unless it is about to sting me in the skull. I have come to realize something, though. I have never really wanted to talk on a mobile phone at all. I like to type and text and type and text and type some more. Voice is so secondary. No wonder I stare at my phones and could care less, but put me in front of a keypad and I'm a hooker at Hunt's Point. It's my obsession with the Keys that makes me pathetic...and I don't mean Alicia (but she's up there too).