Cellaholic appraisal…

A few months ago my daughters Julie and Gina invited me to the AT&T store to buy a new BlackBerry… They insisted I get a one made in this century – the one I had was Ancient and bought years ago and it served me well, but it was slow, had no camera and took forever to Google anything or get Dodger scores, not that Dodger scores matter much to me anymore, or at least so far this season…funny thing tho, I thought my Ancient was an excellent phone as I could send and receive my office emails and have access to phone numbers and addresses with the greatest of ease…but it was not a cool phone…
But it was going to be one of my many birthday gifts and I was tired of the girls and friends laughing at my old cell phone; so they picked me up and drove me to the Lake Forest BlackBerry store.

The sales person who greeted us, a teenage-looking salesperson looked at my BlackBerry and chuckled, but in a nice way…I was expecting a generation gap problem because I don’t think he’d ever seen one that old and motioned for a few sales people to come over and see this relic of the previous century… the Chuckler was dressed nicely, had a shirt and tie on that made me think he just might know what he’s doing…after talking for a few minutes the girls told him about me and how they didn’t want people to laugh at me anymore; he asked me if I had a Facebook account or if I tweeted…I said yes to the Facebook and no to the tweet … I later found out he asked me because of the different applications the new phone could have that my old phone couldn’t… he took me over to the displays and the girls helped me select the new phone…after I picked out a cool looking phone the Chuckster took my old one and walked to the back room to transfer phone numbers, addresses and e-mail addresses...he came back saying he couldn’t get my office or personal e-mail addresses installed; he tried for quite a long time to do it but was unsuccessful…he said I could go on-line and probably get it taken care of...I knew I couldn’t do it myself at home, but thought one of my daughters could do it… they tried and tried but to this day I can’t get e-mails on the new phone…

But now that I’m working out of the house and not having to drive to Riverside to my office and I’m not gone from home that long anymore... I can surprisingly be away from emails for hours and not go nuts like I used to…when I go out to dinner now I sometimes purposely leave the phone at home…it’s kind of neat not being paranoid about missing calls or emails…when I do bring it with me I get more Facebook beeps than I ever thought possible… what can I do?…I have a lot of friends and they love me…I will go back soon to the AT&T store and see if they can add my email addresses; I know I may have to switch to a different BlackBerry model. But enough is enough…I need my e-mails as soon as they’re sent…I’m in business and have to be able to reply to e-mails fairly quickly…if I have to select a non-BlackBerry phone I guess I’ll have to.