[Jeff Higgins]

I have a real love/hate relationship with my smart phone. Most of the time I absolutely abhor the damn thing, but I do recognize its utility. My recent darn near 4,600 mile jaunt in a 52 year old 911 track car was made immeasurably more relaxing with the knowledge that it was in my glove box, ready to call for help should worse come to worse. Yes, I made similar journeys long before there were cell phones, but I did wind up knocking on more than one farmhouse door, or sitting next to a broken down machine (usually a motorcycle) with my thumb out. That might have been more "adventurous", but I was a lot younger then as well. These days I can do with a bit less of that kind of "adventure".

Around the house, it pretty much serves as an erstwhile "wall phone". It stays in one room, I don't haul it around with me. If I'm in the garage tinkering, or at my loading bench, it's upstairs in the kitchen. I'll check it when I go upstairs for lunch or something. When I'm driving it's in the glovebox, riding it's tucked away inside my jacket.

I do not use it to navigate. Nor do I use it to pay for anything (I have no financial information nor access on it). I rarely use it to take pictures, I have a nice digital camera for that. I rarely access the internet on it, finding it more difficult to avoid all of the pop up ads on it than on my desktop computer. I don't use it to download menus at restaurants, preferring paper, and almost never scan any sort of QR code with it. I prefer to avoid all of the invasive little gremlins that now seem to come with scanning them.

In other words, I really don't take advantage of all of its capabilities. Oh well. If it were not for its texting functionality, I would be happy with an old nine pin flip phone.