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A guy on the bus called my $900 phone a waste and it's been bugging me for a month
I was riding the 22 bus in Portland about a month ago and this older guy next to me saw me paying for coffee with my phone and asked how much it cost. I told him it was around $900 and he just laughed and asked why I would ever spend that much on something I drop in the toilet. Part of me gets it, since he pays $25 a month for a flip phone and a prepaid card and has never had a cracked screen in his life. But the other part of me thinks he's ignoring how much of my whole life runs through this thing, like my insurance, my timesheets, and my kid's school alerts. I ran the numbers and I spend about $85 a month on my plan, so that's over $1,900 a year with the phone spread out. So where's the line between a tool that earns its keep and a toy we just got used to? I want to hear from people who downgraded on purpose and whether it actually stuck.
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williams.sage28d ago
That guy on the bus is costing himself in ways he doesn't count. My aunt had a flip phone for years and it was "cheap" until the day she fell and couldn't send a photo of her swollen ankle to anyone, so she waited two days to see a doctor. My cousin's kid missed a school lockdown alert because the district only sends texts and her old phone couldn't get them. The $900 isn't really about the phone, it's about what breaks when the phone can't do the thing. Nobody budgets for the cost of not being reachable.
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