Cutting the hard line

We no longer have a landline. This past week our household made the shift. By no means the first to do so. And certainly not the last. It just made sense at this time.

I needed a new phone. My venerable Nexus 5 was on its last legs. In truth it was probably beyond its last legs. Its battery no longer held a charge for more than a few hours. And there were some other issues all age-related. Plus I was due a new phone for entirely extraneous reasons, which I might mention in a future post.

I’ve had my eye on the Google Pixel ever since it arrived on the scene. And yes, I know there is a new version coming some time in the late autumn. But I needed a new phone now. It seemed like a good opportunity to simply transfer our landline number to a new mobile. But there was a catch.

Without a landline, there would be no way for K. to reach me (or anyone else) when I’m out and about. K. has never had a mobile phone. She says she never needed one. Still, it would be hard to convince her that if she also got a mobile then the only apparent challenge to getting rid of the landline would be obviated. She’d need a stronger reason. But then disaster struck.

A minor disaster. K. lost her beautiful iPod Touch while we were on vacation in Spain. It was a brilliant little device and she was heartbroken. (I’m exaggerating a bit because it had been a gift from me.) So we were faced with the choice of either replacing the iPod Touch with another iPod Touch or move to an iPhone with 128GB of space so that it could also carry all of our music and podcasts. In the end it was not such a hard decision. K. now has an iPhone SE. It’s a little bulkier than her beloved iPod Touch, but still very small by mobile phone standards these days. And she’s already loving it (I think).

The only challenge now is remembering where my phone is at all times (since it now has the old landline number that most people used to reach us) and remembering to turn on its ringer.

I’ll adjust.