Where You At?

I’ve touched on the impending end of individual privacy several times before, but it’s hit home once again. When my cel phone contract expired, I paid a visit to see what’s available in the world of communication bling that will have to do two specific things:

1. Make calls

and

2. Receive calls

Questions from the folks at “V” (a most appropriate nickname for a company that is very hi-tech in service but seems to be run by less-than-humans) led me to believe that they consider anything that handled these requests of mine to only be by-products, nice to have but only a side benefit.

I declined their sales pitches promoting phones that took pictures, saying that I had a camera that did that and allowed me to save, access and email my photos without paying someone for the privilege. I also passed on texting, since I consider that to mostly be a waste of time like sending smoke signals back and forth, whereas in most cases a single simple phone call could have resolved all of the issues in a short verbal burst.

Then I dropped the bomb…. Why can’t I just re-activate one of my ancient Motorola StarTac flip phones (which I still have 3 of, sitting in a box in my office) and just use that one?

This was my all time favorite cel phone, it was sturdy and small enough to slip in my jeans front pocket, and the damn thing just worked everytime and everywhere. Plus, you could flip it open just like a Star Trek communicator, and it didn’t take photos of the inside of my pocket like subsequent Samsung phones did.

Their shocked reply was, “We can’t re-activate that phone because it was made before cel phones had GPS systems built in, and the federal government now requires that all phones have a working GPS installed in order to be used on the ‘V’ network” (and one assumes, all other carriers as well). Wandering through the menu on my current phone (also a Motorola, but a piece of crap that has nothing in common with the StarTac), I did find that there is a GPS selection, on or off.

Hey, there’s a lot more to be added on to this post soon, working some long days in the fantasy castle lately preclude blogging.