Cellular Disruption

I hate cell phones. Really, I do. I hate listening to people carrying on long, intimate, detailed discussions on them when I'm riding the train in to work in the morning or just walking down the street anywhere. I also hate nearly being run over by drivers yakking away instead of having both hands on the steering wheel and actually paying attention to where they're going. (Talking on a cell phone while driving is allegedly illegal in Chicago, yet I see literally dozens of violators every day. Why bother passing a law you have no intention of enforcing?)

I only got one, after years of resistance, because my friends wanted to be able to get ahold of me when they wanted to do stuff and because I wanted my mom or brother to be able to get ahold of me if anything happened to her. (She turns 70 this year, so it's not an unreasonable concern.)

So far, though? My cell phone has gone largely unused. Mom refuses to call me on it, instead leaving messages on my landline answering machine wondering where I am and why I'm not returning her calls. My friends use it occasionally, but we aren't spur-of-the-moment folks anymore--improvised plans are few and far between.

And now, for extra fun, my cell phone has decided to, at random and for no discernable reason, turn itself off. It's not a matter of charging it up--both times this has happened, the phone had been fully charged the night before, it takes days for it to run out of juice, and hooking it back up to the charger didn't turn it back on. It just...stopped.

This happened again Tuesday. Tuesday night, I left it hooked to the charger all night. Wednesday morning? Nothing. Left it home when I went to work. Came back home. Still dead. Hooked it back up to the charger. Nothing...until about 9:45, when it decided to wake up again. Again, no explanation.

This is more trouble than it's worth.