Phoning It In, Again

Earlier this week, a new regulation went into effect locally. Anytime you dial a local number here in Utah, you now have to first include the area code, too. So, pretty much every phone call is now an 11-digit number (counting the "1" before the area code).

Thank goodness for cell phones, so you don't have to dial those 11 digits each time you make a call. The only time-consuming part of the switchover, for me, was having to edit all of my contacts by adding an "801" to the first part of all applicable numbers.

In a recent post, I was a little hard on cell phones. Actually, I was hard on people who do stupid things with cell phones, particularly while they're trying (and I emphasize the word trying) to drive a car at the same time.

I recently upgraded my cell phone to a newer model (see the adjoining picture). It's so much nicer than the old phone, which was kind of like a brick with numbers on the side. True, the new phone is much-more likely to be stolen than the old one, but it also doesn't look like something that was unearthed along with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

One of the best features may be the fact that it is a phone with a flip-top, and that means no more accidentally calling my friend Adam three or four times per week as the phone rests in my pocket. Adam did nothing to deserve this other than the fact that his name was first alphabetically in my old contact list, and the phone went directly to him when it needed to make a phantom call.

Adam was a very good sport about these phone calls. He told me recently that, when they came, he would often overhear me singing along to the radio in my car or other embarrassing things like that.