“Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?”

I was once accused by my high school drama teacher of being a Neo-Luddite. This probably sounds like a strange thing to accuse a seventeen year old of being, but it was bang on the nose, believe me. At the risk of dating myself, by my senior year of high school, cell phones had just become mainstream. Most of my friends had them, and their usage had just been upgraded from ‘for emergencies only by parental mandate’ to “Just don’t go over your minutes, we only get so many per month. And none of this texting malarky — it costs extra!”

Back to the original accusation. I was dead-set against having a cell phone, ever. I thought they were a pointless extravagance. “Why should I carry a phone around with me? What could possibly be so important that I need to have a phone with me all the time? I have a phone at home. There’s a phone in the school office if I need it. There are these things called payphones and call boxes on the side of the road for emergencies. Cell phones are dumb.” So, yes, the observation was accurate. I simply didn’t see the point, and that was that.

Fast-forward to high school graduation. My aunt and uncle very graciously added me to their family wireless plan for the duration of my undergraduate years, and suddenly I had one of those things I so detested. (Seriously, what eighteen year old actually does the “Oh, wow, you really shouldn’t have,” to a techno-toy?!) But it was there, and it was mine, and it meant I didn’t have to have a landline wired into my dorm room. It was a few generations into the Nokia plastic rectangle phones, and it was blue. It went everywhere with me because it was small and fit nicely into a pocket in my backpack. I turned it off every night. After a while I got used to it. It was convenient. It called home reliably, and helped me meet up with friends and study-buddies. “Okay, this isn’t so bad, and it is better than a landline in the dorm.”

I wasn’t a texter until the first year I spent abroad in England, where no one liked to call because it was more expensive than texting. My Nokia didn’t go with me — I had a phone with a special SIM card over there, and my aunt and uncle paid me back for the expense. (They really are delightful.) In any case, I was a year abroad, a year back stateside, and then another year abroad for my MA, all of those years on some version of Ye Olde Plastic Rectangle Phone. When I came home after my MA I was on a prepaid flip-phone for about a year while I figured out exactly what I wanted to do in the cell phone department, and that was when those slide-out keyboards were a new, cool thing, so I transitioned to one of those.

Now, the iPhone had been out for a couple of years by this time, and I was at a new level of Neo-Ludditity. “Who the fuck needs the internet on their phone?! That’s ridiculous! Apps? WTF are apps? It’s a phone. I need it to call and text. GEEZUS.” So I had something new to rail about for a while, and that made the crabby old bag in me very, very happy. At least, until the phone I was using started to crap out on me and I couldn’t find anything to replace it that wasn’t a smartphone.

Yes, in September of 2014 I finally succumbed to the wiles of the touchscreen. It was an adjustment, absolutely, and it took all of a month for me to renege on my promise to myself that I wouldn’t become one of those people who spent every waking moment on their phones and had all the things they used on their computers in duplicate in their pocket at all times. The last bastion of my Ludidity crumbled to the ground. I had apps. I had Google at my beck and call. I could tell the world exactly what I was doing and where at any moment and provide photographic evidence.

Recently, my first-ever smartphone started to go south on me, and I knew it was time for a replacement. Last weekend, I upgraded to the newest, shiniest version in the Samsung Galaxy line (I’ve been a Samsung devotee since Nokia ceased to be a frontrunner in cellular technology) and I feel like kind of a putz. When did I become this person? How? That’s life in the field of progress, I suppose. This new phone is huge, the storage capacity is through the roof, the rat bastards at my provider made me change my plan, and I miss the days of getting a phone for free or cheap at upgrade time because this ‘leasing’ malarky is bullshit. However, my options for super cute cases have increased a hundredfold and I’m enough of a sucker for aesthetically pleasing utility that I’m excited about that — and anyway, it’s so shiny.

But really? If I had it my way, we’d all still be going through Ernestine.