I got a new cell phone, and it’s almost as fancy-pants as yours. Almost.

For many, many moons I had a cell phone that was just a phone. It didn’t take photos, I couldn’t use it to surf the internet, my e-mail didn’t come to my phone – all it did was make phone calls. Oh, and I could send text messages, but cell phones have been doing that almost from the moment there were cell phones, so I don’t see how that counts, especially since all it had was a ten-key pad, so selecting every letter was a three-step process. Remember the last time you had to do that? No, you don’t. It’s like trying to remember the last time you saw a dot-matrix printer, or dialed a telephone. Not “dialed” a push-button phone, but dialed a phone with a dial.

Do you realize there’s a whole generation of people who will be calling the Sunday morning radio show A Way With Words to ask Grant Barrett, “Grant, I’ve been dialing phone numbers all my life, but today, for the first time, I realized I don’t even know what a dial is. What is this dial thing, exactly? And how come we don’t say “key” the number? Even “button” the number would make more sense.” And Martha Barnette will chat with the caller while Grant googles the keywords “telephone” and “dial” before launching into a convincing explanation for the phrase. Meanwhile, I’ll be sobbing into the sleeve of my bathrobe as I listen to the show in my living room, next to my telephone, which still has a dial, because I love the whirr-clickity-click sound phone dials make.

Anyway, I got a new cell phone. It’s the cheap-o version of a smart phone, doesn’t have any apps although it does have a lot of features that I’ll probably never use. I just needed a phone, but the screen sure looked pretty, so I bought it instead of the dorky old thing that just made phone calls. This one can take pictures and I can tweet them. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Tweeting pictures? Years from now nobody will know what that means, either.