Progress

My first cellphone was a Qualcomm QCP 2760. It was a slim little thing, dressed in classy black plastic, with a big round face that you wouldn't mind pressing up against your cheek for a good half-an-hour or more if you were so called upon.

The phone had a solid heft, without feeling like a brick, and it had this decisive ring that didn't make you feel like you were fourteen. Rather, you felt like you were getting a real, honest-to-goodness phone call. Plus, you could take about three days worth of these sorts of calls without having to recharge the thing.

Sure, it didn't have a vibrate function, or an address book that could group multiple phone numbers under one name. But, by all means, the 2760 was a good phone -- and nothing but a phone.

Sadly, I put the 2760 in my bag one day. And then put my bag behind the seat of my car. And then slid the seat so far back that it cracked the phone's green LCD display.

That was a bad day.

My second cellphone was a silver clamshell flip-phone sort of thing, inherited from my sister-in-law and sent off to recycling heaven a few weeks later.

(Hey, it was a flip-phone. I'll be damned if I'm going to "open" my phone every time I want to answer it.)

My third cellphone was again silver. But this time it had a big, high-resolution display and a polyphonic speaker -- both of which were, apparently, perfect for playing games. And that would have been great, I suppose, except that I really wasn't in need of a $120 game of Asteroids.

Besides, the closest thing that that phone had to a regular ring was some retro-futurist version of the William Tell Overture. I suppose I could have downloaded and installed new ringtones, or even made my own. But I have a job, and a life, and I'm not fourteen. So I took it back.

My fourth cellphone, a Kyocera 2001-Or-2010-Or-1984 (or something like that), was somewhat more demure in its stylings. Sure, it weighed a good ounce or two more than my first cellphone, and the 5-line LCD glowed blue whenever you pressed any keys. But those were things that I learned to overlook after a couple months.

After all, the phone didn't insist on butchering Beethoven whenever someone tried to call me. It didn't inform me that I was about to connect to the website for the Kremlin whenever I pressed the wrong button. It didn't have a built-in speakerphone, or a camera, or a can of mace. It simply made calls and received calls. The Asteroids I could deal with.

Of course, this phone didn't get any reception in our new house.

My fifth phone was another Kyocera -- the most basic model I could find in the store. But times have changed, and so have phones.

I'm not sure exactly what the version number of this fifth phone was, but I think it included the letters HAL in there somewhere. Even though HAL was a highly advanced creature, containing enough intelligence to charge me for accessing the list of games that it would gladly download at my behest, it would only play the Kyocera "Phantom" ringtone whenever someone called -- even after I changed the ringer setting to something slightly less likely to make me look like a dork.

So I took it back. Or I tried to. The problem was that I had waited too long and the period for returns had ended.

So they replaced it. For the same model.

My sixth and current cellphone -- which I would otherwise refer to as HAL II, except that I would rather call it Piece of Junk -- will now let me choose something other than the Kyocera Phantom ringtone as my default ringer. But it still runs out of batteries after just one day.

And did I mention that it's much thicker than that QCP 2760 that used to fit so nicely into my pocket? And that you can barely see the text on the screen? And that the stubby antenna nub doesn't retract into the body of the phone when I'm not using it, leaving it primed for poking me in the thigh?

Yes, I imagine that I did.