Cell phone mems

So after my last post, my good friend Jennifer from college was so kind as to remind me about my college cell phone. I think it is definitely worth a blog post. I entered college in the fall of 1998 and graduated in the spring of 2002. During that period of time, the cell phones pretty much all looked like this:



or this:


Mine, on the other hand, looked a little something like this:



It was a hand-me-down from my Dad's stash o' cold-war era cell phones. My Dad's philosophy with cell phones was similar to his philosophy with cars. They just needed to work, and with cell phones, they just needed to work in an emergency.

A few fun facts about my college cell phone:

1) It had no memory capability, so I had to actually memorize people's phone numbers and dial them on the giant keypad every time; I couldn't just program them in.

2) It had no voicemail capability or "missed calls" feature. If you called me and I didn't answer, you had to just keep trying because I would never know it.

3) No fun ringtones -- just one, ear-piercingly-loud-digital-office-phone sounding ring that could be heard well above the crowds or music in a bar or club. It definitely couldn't be set to vibrate, but might have had a silent feature... if it did I never learned to use it because the manual had been lost when I was in junior high, around the time when the phone was purchased. This helped me to avoid missing calls, which was important because of #2. Unfortunately this also meant I couldn't take it a lot of places.

4) It only fit in big purses.

5) Again, it was ok to make fun of it. My friends called it the Zack Morris phone, because it looked like the one Zack used on Saved By the Bell, circa 1992? Behold.



So anyway, imagine me tooling around Auburn in the Sable, in all it's masking-taped, cow-seated glory, chatting on my Zack Morris cell phone, and you can see why my personality is so great... I had a lot to overcome!

Just kidding, it was fun, and I would never change a thing. If I had normal amenities in college I wouldn't have the pleasure of blogging about them today, and again I learned some valuable lessons about growing up and earning the things you want, instead of having them handed to you. So, old cell phone, wherever you are, this next Bud's for you.