Yeah, cell phones certainly have their benefits, but I preferred it when everyone wasn’t so damn accessible, especially myself.
I can appreciate your example, but I may have to actually call a repairman once every year or so. That doesn’t justify the cost of the phone + service, so it really makes no difference to me in that scenario.
As far as owning a cellphone, I never have. When I was younger back in the early 90’s, I even refused to pay for a landline until I got a girlfriend who basically made me.
These days, work was actually providing one for me for a few months until I told them I lost it. (Actually, I accidentally broke it.) During that time, they couldn’t get a hold of me, anyway, because I had the phone turned off all the time. I was too apathetic to charge the darn thing. When I told them I ‘lost it’ they caught on to the fact that it was pointless to try to leash me like everyone else, they could see on their cellphone bill that I wasn’t using any minutes, so they cancelled the service. The phone was a nice one too, a Blackberry Storm, I believe. So now, I’m the only employee working at the company that they can’t get a hold of whenever they want. They have never said a word to me about that. We have a quiet understanding, I guess. It isn’t enough of an irritant for them to rock the boat. Sometimes employers have to put up with a little if they want to keep employees happy, right? I’m still the last salaried employee that refuses to punch the time clock too, but that’s another story.
My wife doesn’t care that I don’t carry a phone. No, she’s not the ‘girlfriend’ that I mentioned earlier. ;-)
Lucky you. I could never get away with what you’ve apparently gotten away with.
In the olden days, I developed a program to allow data center operators to send text messages to us system programmers, as we were called, on our periodic duty. They (the operators) were only happy to do it every night. This was before Al Gore invented the cursed cellphones, when we were carrying pagers. I turned mine off whenever my turn came every three weeks or so, and claimed later that when the page came I must have been in an elevator or underground in the subway (at 2-3 AM!) The operators were always, without exception, able to solve the “problems” all by themselves.