Cell Phones: From Luxury to Necessity
Yesterday I blogged about cell phones being a necessity. There are many reasons for this, but one that I think may rise above all others is the fact that they provide a phone you can have with you at all times. Well except for certain public events like live theater where they ask you to turn it off. Even then you can put the phone on vibrate and take the call in the lobby.
If you’re under the age of about 25, you may not remember what life was like before cell phones. I sure do! And I can’t imagine going back to that era of a fixed wired phone. How well I remember always worrying about having to be home for a call I might have been expecting. There were many times I was expecting a call and had to worry about stepping out and missing it. That important job interview or a long distance call from a loved one for example. The era gave us the terms voice mail tag or phone tag. Clever little names for the back and forth that occurred when people kept missing each other and had to leave voice messages: tag you’re it!
When commercial cell phones first appeared on the scene in the mid 1990’s, they were expensive (not to mention big and unwieldy). Even when they were comparatively expensive, people still adopted the technology. And as the technology got smaller and cheaper, it became a no brainer to adopt them. It’s really easy to how they quickly transitioned from luxury to necessity. Now the question remains, why do people still have wired phones at all when cell phone plans are the same price or cheaper? The wireless revolution continues!
