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I'm not a Luddite, I'm worse. I'm lazy.
I'll adopt new technology, but reluctantly, after a lot of foot-dragging and complaining for no reason. I want to keep my old crap forever, one, because I have an inherent distaste for technological obsolescence and two, because I have an inherent dislike for learning new tricks.
I am an old dog.
So when my blackberry, which was reliable and fuchsia, two of my favourite qualities in electronics, started to be not so reliable, I made some excuses for it initially.
I asked Sean to follow up texts with emails.
I told friends to expect up to 3-hour delays, so if something was time-sensitive, to just go ahead and drop a note in the mailbox and that way I'd be sure to get it.
And to be fair, I do spend a fair bit of time in a concrete box, which I hear is not optimal for reception.
And also, I knew how to set the alarm. I knew how to retrieve voicemails (whether I actually do this or not is none of your business). I had developed a pretty quick way of texting on the tiny little key pad and had the thumb callus to prove it.
Do I want a new phone?
No, I do not.
Mine still pretty much works almost most of the time.
And if it wasn't for the fact that my business card has "crisis" in the title, that might have been okay. My blackberry and I might have been buddies for 7 more years, or until one of us died, or until we were released from our cell phone provider's contract, which is more binding than any marriage.

I did it.
I traded her in.
I brought home a gigantic tablet-pretending-to-be-a-phone and despite the fact that I don't know how to use it, cannot even pick up a phone call with more than 50% accuracy, I do kind of love it.
Not wanting to just throw away a phone that's still got some life (not to mention some fuchsia) left in her, I put my old phone up for sale on Kijiji, thinking that someone might at least want it for the battery or the charger.

I did not expect to meet Larry David.
Well, okay, I did not actually meet Larry David, but I did meet his doppelganger.
Not-Larry David, as it turns out, has a real hard on for Blackberrys.
He's had his since the dark ages, like 5 years ago at least! His is still reliable-ish enough, but it isn't just his personal cell phone usage that has made him a fan. There's also the experiments he conducts in his backyard.

Not-Larry David builds trebuchets.
And if you know anything about men, give them a trebuchet, and they will launch shit with it. Like, all kinds of shit. Blackberrys, for example. And apples. And watermelons.

He takes a Blackberry, zips it in a baggie, and then stuffs it in a watermelon.
He does the same with an iphone.

Then he catapults them both up to 400 feet.

The blackberry, he tells me, fares much better.
Much, much better.

And I am inclined to believe him.
My blackberry survived 2 baths, and I'm talking total immersion, several feet worth of ker-plunk, as well as a semi-permanent residency in my nephew's mouth the first year of his life.

So now my cell phone is off having a glamorous second life as a test dummy.
My new phone is pretty cool. You can draw on it, talk to it, and take hand-written notation. It also knows way too much about me for me to ever throw it away, or give it to a Not-Larry David type. I think it knows this. This is not just a smart phone - it's a smart aleck phone. It corrects me. It suggests that it knows better what I'd like to eat than I do. It's constantly telling me a better way to get home. It gives me conflicting weather reports. It's the kind of smart that makes me feel like I'm living in a world foretold by Isaac Asimov. And it will probably never seen the inside of a watermelon,