I’ve finally joined the club. I’ve bought me an iPhone and retired my ancient cell phone, which had been attracting sympathies from my lunch crowd whenever I placed it on the same table as theirs. Not only was mine dwarfed, it definitely looked outdated and cheap.

But I did not allow my bruised ego to force me to compete with the Joneses. I kept my wits and settled for an iPhone 5, a model or two behind the latest iPhone 6+, on a deal that required no money out on an affordable instalment plan.

New lifestyle

Still, it cost. And it cost even more, because I had embarked on a new lifestyle, half-wittingly. An iPhone is an iPhone; for its class and price, it needs certain practical accessories—a protective glass on the front and back, for instance. As thin and as pliant as a plastic sheet, it was pasted on right there, before I took my iPhone home.

I had been warned that glass bubbles were a natural risk, but that if they did not settle within a week, the glass would be replaced, free of charge. It needed to be replaced only once.

I also thought it smart to insure my iPhone against loss, and signed up when the store offered me first month’s premium free. And, after all that, how could I not get that case in shiny white leather, that would ensure that my phone did not disappear in the abyss of my favorite huge black bag?

One thing led to another, in other words. But I’m not the least bit sorry. I just love my phone. It’s friendly, it’s entertainingly and usefully chatty—news, promos, etc. I like the quality of the pictures I take. Stuck in traffic or waiting rooms, I get on YouTube and my favorite artists come on and help me pass the time pleasantly.

I don’t have to wait until I get home to get e-mails on my laptop. Planning menus and drawing up grocery lists with my girl Lanie are made easier by easy connection and epic texts. I no longer have to chop texts in parts.

When I’m too busy to answer the call or when the caller is someone I’m not excited to be connected to at the time, I have automatic, polite but impersonal answers—“Sorry, I’m busy now, I will call you later.”

Great urgency

Like any machine, my phone is imprisoned in its program, thus lacking in imagination or creativity. But to save me the time, it suddenly turns creative as it tries to predict what I want to say. It often guesses correctly, which is helpful enough.

Wedding proposals are sent by text as are Dear John letters. Both, after all, are matters of great urgency. If cell phones had existed in our time, many teenaged girls would have been spared the agony of waiting for a call too long in coming, because phones at the time were not a personal device readily, privately accessible.

Besides, the culture did not allow girls to initiate calls, let alone conversations.

Cell phones do cut both ways, as does the ultrasound, by which mothers already know as early as the fifth month whether it’s a girl or boy. Of course, it’s been able to catch possible problems for both mother and child early.

Different world

In any case, ours was a different world. Life was simpler, the world less populated and more or less at peace, and nothing seemed so urgent, unlike today. But then, cell phones in the wrong hands can be deadly, and deadliest as a terrorist-attack trigger. Trust the terrorist to ruin just about every innocent thing.

Again, it cuts both ways. In the right hands, cell phones are an important aid to law enforcers. Electronic gadgets deliver information on demand and news almost as it happens; thus empowered, we are able to act faster than ever.

Young working mothers install closed-circuit TV cameras at home to be able to monitor their children through their cell phones. By the same technology, children can call or be called. Families are thus constantly connected. I myself carry an album of family pictures in my phone with voice recordings. It’s like getting an electronic hug on demand.

Although I feel lucky having known the world before the cell phone, I’m totally enamored of electronic gadgets now. My phone is connected to my laptop, and so is my FitBit (a gadget I wear to measure the number of steps I’ve made and the calories I consume). Indeed, I Google anything.

I’m just happily hooked.