Man-Rule: Don't Throw Things Away Before You Have To

As you've probably noticed, things don't last very long these days. Manufacturers follow the guideline of "planned obsolescence," which is a Latin term meaning "an excuse to sell you the extended service warranty."

As a Man, you should fight this trend. You should keep using things until they're broken beyond repair, and then you should wrap some duct tape around them and use them some more. You should have at least three pairs of underwear in your drawer that your wife keeps surreptitiously trying to throw away, because all they are, really, is a collection of holes being held together by a few underwear molecules, but you continue to wear them anyway. You should have t-shirts that would fit better on a Ken doll than on your pasty, flabby body, but you still wear them to church. You should have tools in your tool chest that are so old you have no idea what they actually do, but you keep them, just in case you might need them one day.

I took a similar stand - although one that was ultimately doomed to failure - with my first cell phone.

Now, I will freely admit I came to the cell-phone craze late. My wife Kristin bought me my first cell phone in 2003. I still keep a picture of it for sentimental reasons:

Looks like a walkie-talkie, doesn't it? Needless to say, this wasn't a smartphone. It wasn't a dumbphone, either ... it was just a phone. I liked it. It made calls. It received calls. That's all I needed it to do.

I used it for five or six years, until the battery just completely pooped out and wouldn’t recharge any more. I tried wrapping some duct tape around it, but that didn't help. So, reluctantly, I took it to my local Verizon store to get a replacement.

I walked in, told the guy at the desk I needed a new phone because mine had stopped working, and he pulled up my account on his computer. A rather strange look came over his face.

“You’ve never upgraded your phone?” he asked. There was a tone of disbelief in his voice.

“No,” I said. “Like I said, mine has worked fine until now, but it won’t charge any more. Actually, if you just have a battery for it, I can get that.”

He still had a strange look on his face. “Do you have your phone with you?” he asked.

I said “Sure” and pulled it out of my pocket.

You would have thought I had put the Holy Grail on the counter. The sales guy was stunned, and I swear his hand was trembling a bit as he reached out to touch my phone.

“Steve!” he yelled, without turning his head or taking his eyes off my old phone. “Come out here and take a look at this guy’s phone!”

I started to sweat a little bit; I wondered if Kristin accidentally bought some sort of super-secret phone that only the President was allowed to have or something. Maybe each time I’d made a phone call from 2003 through 2009, my presidential phone, unbeknownst to me, was also transmitting important state secrets. Maybe I was the one responsible for gas hitting four dollars a gallon. I considered running out of the store before they called the Phone Police on me. God only knows what the penalty would be for causing cell-phone gas price hikes. Before I could leave, though, Steve came out of the back room, and when he saw my phone laying on the counter he stopped dead.

“Where did you find that phone?” he asked. He was talking to me, but he was still staring at the phone itself.

“I didn’t find it,” I said. I was really nervous now. “It’s mine. It quit working a couple of days ago, and I need to get a new one. Or a battery. Whatever.”

“This phone worked until a couple of days ago?” Steve asked. Clearly he thought my phone was the telecommunications equivalent of a Model T Ford.

They asked me if they could keep the phone; they said they usually give old phones back to the customer, but they wanted to hang on to mine. I got the impression they were going to be featured in Verizon’s employee newsletter and maybe receive a large cash award for finding the World’s Oldest Cell Phone Still Being Used by a Customer.

Once I realized I wasn’t going to be arrested, I was amused by their reaction, but the more I thought about it the more frustrated I got. These guys clearly didn't subscribe to the Man-Rule of Don't Throw Things Away Before You Have To. It didn’t help when I had to borrow the first guy’s cell phone to call Kristin to ask her a question about our account, and I couldn’t figure out how to dial his phone. I mean, I could see the buttons and such, but each button had a slightly raised area that was a different color, and it was obvious that each of the buttons had multiple functions, and Lord only knew what some of those functions were. I was afraid I’d nuke Iran, or make gas prices go up again, if I dialed wrong. So I asked the guy to dial Kristin’s number for me. After I talked with her, I handed the phone back to the sales guy, and he had to end the call, because I didn’t know how to hang up.

Naturally, I still have the replacement phone I got back in 2009. I'm too scared to upgrade again, because now cell phones are more powerful than the computer I'm using to type this (which is five years old, and I still haven't figured out how to use all the gadgets and programs on it  yet). And it worries me, because a couple of the buttons on my cell phone aren't working right any more.

I wonder if I can fix it with one of the old tools in my tool chest.

(c) 2013 John Puckett