Didn't We Almost Have It All?

I am in new phone countdown. I have been ready to launch my phone off a cliff for months now, a first-generation Chocolate. The phone is quite stunning and I had the hots for it immediately. One look and I knew I wanted to just get my hands all over that thing. Maybe that was part of our problem. There were no shared interests, no inside jokes, no shared love of foreign films and walks in the rain. I have nothing in common with this phone! It was superficial phone lust pure and simple. And the moral of this story is: Never Buy First-Gen. Things will malfunction, the employees at the phone store will stare at you with glazed eyes and shrug their shoulders.

Well now it is that time of year, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Verizon has started bombarding my house with glossy adverts of sexy new candidates. "Hey, your contract is about to expire, why don't you ditch that piece of crap and upgrade to a new model? We know we didn't really care that it sucked, but can't we start over again? We really want to make it work this time."

Even from the beginning, the sensitivity was all over the place. I never knew how he wanted to be handled, sometimes all he needed was 1 soft tap, sometimes 2 hard whacks with a mallet, so emotionally unstable. Then he started with the scrolling wildly when you would go to make a call and calling random people in my Contact List (highly inadvisable). Very passive-aggressive behavior, right? If I had a $1 for the number of times I hung up on people I never meant to call, I'd probably have enough money to send them all flowers.

Oh Chocolate, it could have been so great. Where did it all go wrong? The crappiness of the touchscreen make the most common of phone acts cumbersome and sometimes impossible. And don't even think you will be tossing out your iPod because this thing holds music, as loading it and listening to it is kind of a pain in the ass without a working touchscreen.

Fast forward to now, my touchpad 'dial' function is completely kaput, he has just tuned me out completely. The only way to place a call is to go through a SEVEN step process (I just counted)which includes entering and saving the number, exiting and entering different screens, scrolling through your contact list, using the 'options' button to navigate to CALL. Gee, that sounds quick and easy right? What if you want to just call a number once in your life, like Home Depot or something? Too bad, have to create an entry for it anyway. Right now in my phone there are dozens of entries that start with 'aa' so I don't have to scroll far to get to them. It looks like someone with a thick Italian accent got into my contacts and is reading them aloud: aaPapa Johns, aaDr. Smith.

It is so over between me and this Chocolate, I can't stand the sight of him anymore and yet here he is, still hanging around. Can't he take a hint? In my mind, I am already at the Verizon store, fantasizing about my new hot phone and how much happier it is going to make me than this sorry excuse for a communication device.

So who am I lusting after now? A Blackberry Pearl, maybe even in pink. A bit metrosexual I know but he is that confident in his masculinity. Never mind the fact that I have absolutely no need for instantaneous email updating and surfing the web while I'm grocery shopping. I am a telecommuter with a baby at home for God's sake, I'm not flying across the country on the red-eye for an uber-important meeting in the morning. Even though it has no practical purpose in my life, I just love the way it looks. I am talking myself out of it though, or trying to. But maybe I'll get an EnV so I can at least twitter from the coffee and tea aisle, that sounds fun. You know you want to hear what is on sale this week and whether the lady in front of me used coupons.