Thursday, July 12, 2007

Strictly Cell?

I've been toying with the idea lately of ditching the landline.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. J and I both have cell phones, and I know mine would end up being the "primary" phone number (the one all the Dr's offices call with reminders about appts, the one the pizza place uses to identify our address when we call in an order, etc.) and that's ok. If we go out, we could always leave his phone here and take mine so we can check in with whoever's watching the Muffins (although, they're never watched by someone who isn't family, and all of those people have cell phones, too).

I just think it's ridiculous to keep paying over $70 a month ($70!) for the landline. But, I also like knowing that I don't always have to keep my cell handy. I can leave it at home if I want and know that someone can leave a message on the home phone. I suppose that I feel that having both a landline and a cell affords me the ability to not have to care when the phone rings. Is that stupid? (Yeah, I know, I could always let it go to voicemail, but somehow it seems like more work to deal with accessing my voicemail on my cell than to listen to the messages on my machine. I'm crazy, I know.) I think I would resent that I might feel tied to my cell phone all of the time.

Ditching the landline means an upgrade to our plan, most likely doubling the minutes on our current plan (which would still be significantly less expensive than keeping the landline) and an upgrade in phones. Maybe I'd be less conflicted if I liked the new phone and didn't feel like a slave to it?

For his part, J is all on board with ditching the landline except...in the case of an emergency, he likes that fact that a call to 911 could be easily and quickly traced to the landline.

I guess there's a part of me that is concerned that it might be irresponsible to only have cell phones when we have young children.

Maybe I'm overthinking it?

What do you think?

1 comment:

Antropóloga said...

A lot of people just have cells now...of course we just have the landline. We're not so popular we need cells. :)