I have entered the twenty-first century by cutting my landline and going cellular. Last Friday I sealed the deal and cancelled my landline service. As of this coming Thursday I will no longer have a working landline. Cellular technology must be very old news for the majority of you who are reading this. To this day I have never made a call on a cellphone nor sent a text message. The telephone is not important to me, and I would not miss it if it disappeared. I am thus thoroughly unimpressed with cell telephony and have no desire to increase my connectivity with people or with the Internet via a mobile device.

The reason I have acquired a cellphone is entirely based on saving money: I will halve my monthly phone bill by cutting the landline and getting a cell. The intuitive convenience of having a cellphone–that you can take the damn thing with you–is wholly of no importance to me. Nor are the techy gizmos or applications you can add to the phone. Forget about Angry Birds, I’m not even getting call display or voice mail.

To see me when I walked into the phone place and started asking nervous questions, you’d think I was in w-a-y over my head. I most certainly was. I was asking cell questions with an Amish twist, trying to retain my communication comfort zone by asking for a cell that “closely resembled an old-fashioned landline receiver in size”. I was not laughed out of the store but I had to persuade the employee that I did not want anything but the bare basic model. No sliding keyboard, no fancy ring tone, just a phone.

Mark and I have talked about my phone switchover (we are a couple where until this Thursday neither of us has a mobile) and I told him that I do not intend to take my new phone outside of the house. This might seem counterintuitive. Isn’t the whole purpose of having a cellphone so that you can use it anywhere? I must be really auld school because I still think that a phone conversation is a private matter. Come on, Craig, get with it. Everyone walks and talks. For them, fine. For Miss Manners and me, we still consider telephone conversations to be a matter of personal privacy. At least when you call me (provided I pick up) you will know where I am: when I answer the phone, I am at home.