To keep up, phone-wise, he’ll just have to get with it

In my continuing effort to convince myself I’m still “with it,” I decided not to print out a boarding pass for a flight to visit my family in North Carolina last weekend. OK, I didn’t actually decide that. What happened is that I ordered the ticket on an app and couldn’t figure out how to print out the boarding pass it sent to my cellphone.

But that’s not the point. The point is that people who are “with it” don’t use boarding passes anyway. They don’t print them out on their computer or stand in line for an hour or so to have an agent hand them one. They just place their cellphone over the scanner at the gate and somehow that allows them to board.

So my cellphone and I go to the airport, where I glance at the screen frequently to assure myself there’s still a boarding pass on it. But before my flight can be called, I notice that the phone’s battery indicator, which was at 100 when I left home, is inexplicably down to 32 and rapidly zooming toward zero. So I sprint to the ticket counter, stand in line for an hour or so and obtain a paper boarding pass from the agent.

I’m not sure what the problem was. That phone can’t be more than 7 or 8 years old, and I don’t use it to watch movies, listen to the four songs I have on it or play video games. I don’t even text a lot of friends, due mostly to the fact that I don’t have a lot of friends. And the ones I DO have don’t know how to text, either.

According to the settings information on the phone, it still has 44.51 of the 64 GBs that came with it and 87% of battery life. You’d think 87% of anything should be fine.

But now I’m pretty sure I’ll need to undergo the ordeal of getting a new cellphone, which is second on my list of ordeals only to the ordeal of buying a new car because the people who sell cellphones and I do not speak the same language. They’ll blab about calling plans, text, data and gigadoodles. They’ll advise me about PPI, VPN, HDR and mAh.

It’s all Geek to me, and by the time they get done advising me, my eyes will have glazed over; I’ll be confused, and they’ll be able to talk me into buying whatever they want, including a time share in Youngstown, Ohio.

But I guess I’ll just have break down and get a new phone, though. Because I can’t be “with it” without it.