Recently I was having lunch with a couple of friends.  Conveniently, it was cold, so I was able to keep my cell phone in my coat pocket.  I say “conveniently” because my phone weighs about 3 pounds and is about the size of an encyclopedia.  Unfortunately it rang.  When I had wedged it out of my coat pocket and rested it upon my shoulder, one of my kinder friends (he happens to be a bit extroverted, by that I mean he requires constant public attention, a trait for which I love the man) blurts out into the restaurant, “What in the hell is that?”

I was talking on the phone while he was riding my slice of technology like a show pony.  I couldn’t even counter him, as I was attempting to be businesslike until I had hit the “end” button.  This button occasionally works, by-the-by.  “It’s a cellular telephone,” I reply, as I beat the thing on the table to end my call.  “You may have heard of them.  All the stars are carrying them nowadays.”

The friends that I was dining with were attempting to make me lust by letting me watch The Dark Knight on their cool, sleek iPhones.  And, “Check out this video on YouTube.”  Now their little ploy to fuel my desire for a phone that I can actually lift was working quite well.  I probably deserve one.  Right?

My phone used to have the word “Cingular” on it, until ear grease and hair product finally ate it away.  It used to be silver, but now it is grey and even white in some spots, a little bit like a wireless leopard.  It used to have a brilliant blue screen which boasted of it’s capacity to run Windows.  The screen is currently a translucent cornflower blue.  Sometimes, if you call me, it rings.  Other times it just makes a lamenting noise to indicate that I have voicemail.  This is my phone’s way of quoting Monty Python – “I’m not dead yet!”

I prefer to think of my antique phone as simply “practicing lent.”  It has given up many of it’s feature, but it’s 50/50 incoming ring ratio is about right for my telephone tastes any ways.

Of course if I paid more attention to TV, I’d know better than to carry this piece of garbage around.  Phones are the new cars, as far as advertising goes.  Remember when vehicles were purposed to matriculate humans from one place to a desired destination?  When the VW Beetle was reintroduced, do you remember what it had a space for on the dashboard?  It had a freaking flower vase.  “This car comes with a garden.”  We all know how necessary it is to travel with living produce!

Likewise, phones were once a way to contact friends without using a stamp.  Now one must have a buttonless phone; either an iPhone, or its look-alike, or a tiny little sliding deal about the size of a Pez dispenser, minus the cool cartoon head.  These phones must take brilliant photos and allow the owner to bring his or her personal movie theater onto an airplane.  Listen, phone manufacturers, when your devices can make popcorn with extra butter, I’ll bite!

Well, Madison Avenue, I’ll have none of it!  I’ll ring up people on my old cell phone until all the incoming voices sound like the falling-duck ringtone (2 years ago this ringtone sounded like a roaring guitar).

Fortunately for us, we are more than consumers and stimulators of the slumping economy.  We are more than purveyors of changing technology.  There is a Proverb that states: “A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children, but the sinner’s (the Hebrew here implies, “those who practice envy while watching movies on another man’s iPhone) wealth is laid up for the righteous.”  Here’s the Lenten Cell Phone Theological Moment: You don’t need a phone that doubles as a back-massager.  Period.  And feel free to ignore incoming calls that might tell you otherwise.

For more on “stuff we need” watch, The Story of Stuff.