Colour me crotchety.

Someone should have done me a favour and sent me an email letting me know that I was falling out of step. I have come to the conclusion that I am officially not keeping up with the tech that I’m “supposed to need”. The catalyst for this revelation lies in the fact that my cute little boy is about 15 minutes shy of hitting the puberty wall. As such, we decided it was high time to "cell phone up" the family. We own one pre-historic, refurbished, junk cell phone that my wife buys prepaid minutes for, you know… just in case she runs out of gas or something. We’ve decided to ditch the old clinker and expand our phone connections with one another, simply to allow my boy some freedom in the big bad city. This is okay with me. That part I get. It’s a useful thing.

I’m a grumpy old man when it comes to the effect that cell phones have had on our culture and society. I observe people using them and I think they are simply compulsively consuming technology for no good reason. When I ride my bike I notice people wandering the streets, yammering away on their freaking cells about absolutely nothing. It goes like this: “Yeah, yeah… I know… no, I’m on Broadway… oh I dunno, maybe… wait, I gotta put you on hold, my line is beeping. Hi? Yeah, yeah… I know… no, I’m at Granville…” (Ad infinitum, rinse and repeat.) It’s like they need to chatter with people about the most banal elements of their life just to justify their existence. The phone companies are more than happy to enable this pretentious, needy addiction. It’s how they get rich.

You can smell the steaming piles of cash that entrepreneurs are raking in now that everyone on this sweet green planet believes that they are supposed to be connected by a wireless umbilical to the their respective hives. Here I am, standing equidistant from diapers to deathmask, and I realize that the cell phone merchants are too cunning by half. I mean. I like to think I’m pretty savvy when it comes to gizmos and sales pitches, but the bewildering onslaught of marketing mumbo-jumbo involved in choosing home and wireless phones is mind numbing. I think those cell phone people must assume I’m an idiot, which doesn’t surprise me considering how most of their best customers behave.

All I want is to have simple, cheap cell phones so that my son can check in, and so I can find him in case someone’s trying to sell him crack at the skytrain station. No features beyond call display and a smallish amount of local calling minutes are required. This means that I’m not the kind of customer they want. Cheap and simple isn’t what they sell. Minimal, convenient use is my plan, but it doesn’t seem to be in any of the “plans” they offer.

Go ahead. Try to find it. I did. I spent two hours online looking at what Fido, Rogers, Shaw and Bell had to offer. I was confronted by a dizzying array of choices, conditions, premiums, and sweet deals. I could combine my high speed internet service with digital phone to save money. Or… I could ditch the landline and make my cell a wifi home line. Then I could then put the savings into awesome phones with cool features. Cheap phones, costly phones, some included in a “plan”, some not. More phones to choose from that grains of sand on the beach, all offering similar yet different features, plans, minute packages, long distance deals, text deals, email deals, roaming deals, web surfing deals, ring-tone deals, GPS deals, oh… and a fucking pony that’ll give you a blowjob. Look, look! Sparkly!!

You can get couples plans and family plans and pay as you go plans. Online most of the sites make you fill up the “shopping cart” in order to get an idea of what it will cost. Just one more click and they’d be sending you your sexy box of wireless tech and a fat monthly bill for the next 2 or 3 years.

Don’t misunderstand. I love tech toys. I’m like most guys that grew up with the first wave of video games. I love my computer and internet and hidef TV. They dangle that goddamn 3g iphone before my eyes like the Holy Grail and I feel a convulsive jerking desire to acquire. I try to think of any reason in the world that would justify the expense of such a neato and advanced trinket. Sadly, I can’t really spend thousands of dollars over three years so that I can wander the streets, and surf the web, and talk to friends, and remotely update facebook, and listen to the new Feist, and watch Spiderman 3 as I download porn, er … I mean classical music. That toy is for only the extremely rich, pretentious, or tech-addicted. It’s not part of my “cell phone for minimal, convenient use plan”. More’s the pity.

So what do I do? I have no choice. It’s time to gird my loins and actually try to talk to humans about these options. The kiosk at Costco appears reasonably benign. I’ve clawed my way through the first layer of bafflegab on the web, so at least I can see what’s coming. Let’s see if the sales guy will try to blind me with brilliance or baffle me with bullshit. Chances are he'll be half my age and find me hostile. Either way, I fear I’ll have a hard time finding one of their “plans” that will fulfill my plan.

I’m getting too old for this…