I don't forsee myself getting a cell phone soon (due to other objections, mainly being tethered to a phone all the time), but if I do, this should be a good reference.

I rarely have my phone on at all. I used to turn it on when I left the house, but as I've started driving, I leave it off since I don't want to juggle a phone and a steering wheel at the same time. I'm not sure of when, exactly, I'd find it sufficiently non-distracting to merit it being turned on.

Even so, I have a phone so that my uncle can call me and vice versa. If he does, I'll hear what he had to say on voice-mail. ;)

By the way, the third-to-last paragraph seems to have been cut off: "and you couldn't get a flip-phone, and you couldn't play games onyo".

Fixed. Too bad I didn't keep that WriteRoom around; I had to reconstruct it from memory.

I wonder if it's a Markdown bug. (I wrote the post in Markdown, and invoked the Markdown filter via a service made with ThisService. I did the same thing with this comment, actually.)

One of the reasons I wrote about pre-paid cell phones in the aside is because I had recently gone to Italy for a quarter abroad, and by far the vast majority of phone operators there offer pre-paid service. Monthly contracts over there seemed to be as prevalent as pre-paid service contracts were over here, at that time anyway. I got a cell phone just for those few months, and I found the pre-paid method much more appealing.

By the way, the third-to-last paragraph seems to have been cut off: "and you couldn't get a flip-phone, and you couldn't play games onyo".

I also find it quite amusing that you quoted that whole paragraph from my post. Since you're talking about pre-paid cell phones, though, you kind of have to include the whole paragraph (as the one sentence alone might seem out of context), but it's really funny to see my vitriol on someone else's weblog. :)