This is the first installment of Henry Colt’s 10-part weekly column. Each week will have a different theme; this one is technology.
I got my first flip phone a few days before I started high school. That summer I’d had my first job (picking squash for $7.25 an hour), and presumably my parents’ idea was that I would need that matte black LG Revere to handle adult tasks like scheduling work shifts. Mostly, I used it to text girls I lacked the courage to talk to face-to-face.
Then I lost the Revere under the seat of my friend’s parents’ car.
My next phone was a Slider — a demonic invention that had the annoying habit of texting people of its own accord while it bounced around in my backpack. One day after cross country practice, the Slider fell in a bucket of ice, and died.
I then owned two more Reveres. The first I accidently squashed under a chair leg, but the second, my longest tenured phone, suffered a different fate: the Smartphone Upgrade.
Not owning a smartphone until age 24 was, in my friends’ view, a case of arrested development as shocking as if I’d yet to have my first kiss. One by one, they’d all taken the plunge, and in doing so had initiated themselves into that email-worshipping cult of adulthood in which I wanted no part.
Or so I thought.
My trusty flip phone, the last remaining relic of my carefree adolescence, was becoming less and less trusty by the year. My inability to navigate without a gazetteer had transitioned from Cute Novelty to Flat-Out Liability because, well, how many twenty-somethings own a gazetteer? That I couldn’t use Slack — the app on which we communicated at work — meant that I was frequently in the wrong place at the wrong time. And every Snapchat I missed out on tugged ever-so-slightly at my heartstrings. I began, each week, to save. Each night, visions of Androids danced in my head.
Henry Colt dries off after falling in Sitka Channel Sunday. (Sentinel Photo)
Purchasing a smartphone was a serious enough event that I set aside an entire Saturday for it, and even drank a cup of coffee in the morning (another sign of adult aspirations). But my attempt at adulthood didn’t seem to convince the salesmen at the Verizon store. When I whipped out my LG Revere, the two salesmen thought it was some sort of prank. To them, my Revere must have seemed as crude as a stone tool chiseled by a Neandertal. “Seriously, mate?” the Scottish one said. The American one just smirked.
But once they realized there was no prank — that in fact they had a potential commission coming their way — they sprang into action. The Scottish salesman, whose quaffed hair looked like that of a cockatoo on its night out, morphed into Android Man. According to him, my active lifestyle necessitated something stout, like a Samsung.
iPhone Man, a study in conservative hairstyles, was quieter: his shiny XR spoke for itself. It was Good-Cop-Bad-Cop, Smartphone Edition, and I was gobbling it up with a spoon.
After oscillating for hours between a Google Pixel and an iPhone 8, I asked Android Man about a poster of a sleek Motorola that had caught my eye all morning. He glanced at his partner, then looked me in the eye and told me I’d do great with a Moto Z4. 20 minutes later, I walked out of that Verizon store a new man.
Oh, how I loved my Moto! Its slim body, its pitch-perfect weight in my palm, the way it said “Hello Moto” in an ambiguous European accent every time I turned it on.
I didn’t mind that my first texts were glacial affairs full of extra letters and strange havoc wreaked by autocorrect. I didn’t even mind that my first Slack message, intended for the social channel, wound up in the professional channel. I sent cheerful emails. I took unironic selfies. I read the same online reviews of my new Moto, over and over and over again. Those first few weeks flew by with the giddy breeze of a love affair, a realm of the adult world to which I’d already been initiated.
Then one evening, two months later, I was reporting a story about a holiday boat parade. I must have been intently focused on whatever I was scribbling in my notebook, because the next thing I knew I was fully submerged in the ocean — I had walked off the dock and into the water. Luckily, the photographer I was working with fished me out. Then, in the nick of time, he fished out my reporter’s notebook, which had begun to float away.
My notebook eventually dried out, and I became un-hypothermic, but the fate of the Z4, which had been in the pocket of my parka when I fell in the water, was still up in the air.
I followed the internet’s advice and plunged it immediately into a box of instant rice, where it would stay for 36 hours. While my moto lay in its soft bed of grains, my first thought was how much a new phone would cost me — but that seemed like a premature betrayal to my wounded companion. So instead I thought about the wacky emojis I’d sent my girlfriend, the 32 gigabytes of memory whose surface I’d barely scratched, and the photos of my family I’d taken on its 48-megapixel camera. Most of all, I thought, “hang in there, little moto.”
When the instant rice couldn’t resuscitate Little Moto, I found my old LG Revere, which for some reason I hadn’t been able to bring myself to throw away. Next to Moto, it looked featureless, like an old friend I no longer recognized. I felt a bit sorry for it. I looked at Moto, then at the Revere, then back at Moto, then back at the Revere.
Then I ordered an $89 iPhone SE from eBay, which is on its way from Kansas as I type this sentence.
