But so what if cell phones are expensive and don't work very well. They're cool.

That's why I wanted one. I said we needed one for emergencies, like, um … when, uh, ya know, like, there's a snowstorm? And, and, and … Jessica is traveling alone? At night? Yeah. Yeah, always at night. And a spaceship immobilizes every vehicle in the area? Um, OK. Forget the spaceship. But something. Like, I don't know. Because nothing happens, really. Not like in the old days when something with a name like "flywheel" or "carburetor" fell out of the engine just after making a loud clunking sound. So, OK. But, something. Because something could go wrong. And then wouldn't we be glad we had a cell phone? Of course, its battery would be so low that she would sound like someone spelling supercalifragilisticexpialidocious while getting tubes stuck down her throat and I would hang up thinking it was a prank call. Still...

I did try hard to find the useful purpose in my extravagance. But in the end, I knew that what I wanted was the extravagance. I wanted to walk down the street and flip the phone open, like someone out of Star Trek. "Jessica? I should be molecularizing there in about 3.2 minutes. Jessica? Jessica? No, I'm not gargling. M- ZSHHH batt…s KSZIT low."

Who cared that the reality crashed like a bad hard drive on my dream of coolness? I would be modern.

Finally, I bought a cell phone. I didn't like it. I ordered it over the Internet and when it showed up on my doorstep, it didn't look like the picture. I mean, it did. But not like I thought the picture looked. Am I making sense? Well, never mind. If the point of a cell phone was looking cool, I couldn't be seen with this. For months, I never even took it out of the box. When someone told me that it didn't matter whether you activated it, you still had to pay for the service, I canceled the whole thing and sent it back.