OMG I have a cellphone now, Part 2

So I got a shiny new cellphone on the weekend. Before I bought my new toy, I hadn't used a cellphone of any kind in years. I was so uninformed about them that I wasn't quite sure where you were supposed to talk. There isn't an obvious mouthpiece on my new phone. How does it hear what I say? I soon discovered that if I hold the earphone to my ear and just talk normally, the phone picks up my voice just fine. OK, that's one problem solved.

If that isn't bad enough, I still am not quite sure how to answer calls and ensure that my part of the conversation is getting through. I got an unexpected call today on my new phone; when I answered it, the caller couldn't hear me talking, and hung up. I eventually figured out that the Answer button on the phone becomes a Mute button when pressed again. Presumably, if I press Answer for too long, my phone interprets it as Answer plus Mute. Hmmm. Fortunately, there's a way around this. If I press the Call key to answer the phone, my end of the conversation is less likely to be non-existent.

I have decided that, if this happens again, I'll look up the caller's phone number, return the call, and then blame a phantom "reception" problem. Hopefully, that will fool him or her (unless the caller happens to have read this blog).

Okay, now on to the ringtones. By default, my phone's ringtone is the Telus theme music. It's tolerable, but a bit too perky for my liking. The only other bearable ringtone is one called "Agency", which sounds like a land-line phone ringing. That's the one I picked. All the others, basically, suck. Here they are:

• Bloom, which sounds simultaneously perky and melodramatic.
• Espionage, which is meant to sound dramatic and mysterious, but sounds kind of twee - it's the ringtone equivalent of people who think that obvious puns are funny.
• Festival, which sounds vaguely like a Caribbean band. Yeah, like I want to hear that in the middle of winter.
• Fiesta: my phone is, basically, doing the mambo. If I can't do the mambo, I'm not going to allow my phone to, either.
• Halo, which sounds cutesy. Cutesy doesn't work for me.
• Jink, which is intended for somebody into hip-hop. I'm whitebread, so that's not me.
• Memory, which is more cutesy than Halo. Ick.
• Nocturnal, which is meant to sound dramatic and mysterious and like hip-hop. I might be too old for my cellphone.
• Nokia tone, which is the old-school cellphone ringtone. I am not nostalgic for the old days of cellphones (when phones were the size of your shoe), so this doesn't work for me.
• Nuance, which sounds like Easy Rock. I hate Easy Rock with a passion.
• Oceanic, which is the aural equivalent of a really cheesy souvenir shop.
• Party: absolutely the last thing you want to hear when you're hung over.
• Stargazing: sounds exactly like one of those cheap Casio synthesizers. I don't want to hear this when I'm hung over, either.
• Tumbler: sounds like Eurodisco. I don't lead a glamorous enough life for this ringtone.

I still haven't figured out how to do text messages yet, and I've accidentally started to dial somebody's number by mistake about six times already. (If you're a friend of mine, and your phone rang once either yesterday or today, it was probably me. Sorry about that.) But I have figured out how to use the camera - my video screen wallpaper is now a rather nice shot of the Prince Edward Viaduct in Toronto, if I may dare say so myself.

The moral of the story: technology is cool, even if I haven't quite mastered it yet.