Being Anti-Social

I have a confession…

I have been anti-social since November 3, 2011.

How can I pinpoint an exact date for my anti-socialness? It’s simple. November 3, 2011 was the day I downgraded from my iPhone and switched instead to a Samsung Craptalaxy, Version WTF 2.0.

In layman’s terms, because of an personal economic downturn, I needed to scale back on my expenses. One of the places we scaled back was our cell phones. Having an iPhone, while altogether delightful, is altogether too expensive. Through AT&T (and I think a few other carriers as well), owning an iPhone also means being obligated to subscribe to their data plan which comes to $30/month per phone. That’s an additional $60/month on top of whatever you pay for the amount of minutes you require. At the beginning of November we were paying nearly $200/month for two iPhones with mandatory data plans. It was outrageous.

So, we downgraded to the Craptalaxy (actually a Samsung Strive) because it’s one of the few phones that 1) didn’t require a data plan, and 2) was free (although their definition of free includes an “upgrade fee” even though we were downgrading). This effectively cancelled all of our common social interactions that were carried out through our phones… no texting, no uploading photos, no tweets, etc.

When you’ve grown accustomed to having all of these conveniences, to stop cold turkey can be a bit jarring. People we’d texted often were wondering why all of their texts were bouncing back as undeliverable. There was a sharp decline in our status updates and photo uploads to the point people were asking if something happened in our marriage! Ha! How’s that for crazy social correlation! I stop tweeting and that means my marriage is on the rocks!

Anyway, this past Wednesday, I was lamenting to a friend about the fact that my phone is only good for making and receiving calls. She proceeded to tell me about her phone and carrier that only charges $40/month for unlimited 4GLTE data, talk and text. Yep, you heard right… UNLIMITED. Of course, being able to wade back into texting and familiar social circles was appealing. So I checked on it. And you know what? She was right!

Not only was she right, but the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The carrier currently has a sale on the phone which provides a $50 instant rebate combined with another $50 mail-in rebate which bring the cost of the phone down to $49. Plus, by signing up two phones on the same plan, they offer a $5/month “Family Plan” discount per phone. So instead of paying $80/month for the two phones, we’re only paying $70/month… for UNLIMITED DATA, TALK and TEXT.

The phone is an LG Motion which looks like this:

It’s a great little phone that is eerily reminiscent of the early iPhone that I downgraded from. But it’s got a powerful processor and runs all the apps I had before and then some! So, I’ve returned to Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare. And now I can even log into Xanga and WordPress!

So anyway, I’m no longer anti-social. As a matter of fact, my son got me to sign up for a Snapchat account. So if anyone wants to connect with me there, my name, as you probably could guess, is MyxlDove.