You know your 2-year contract is almost up when your cellphone provider sends you an offer for the latest fabulous phone with all the features “everyone” wants now. All you have to do to get it mailed to you free is add another line of service and commit to another 2-year contract.
Motorola Qwerty
While most kids and young adults can easily ‘text’ with a standard keypad, it’s OK if you can’t. They have phones with typewriter (QWERTY) keypads. You don’t want to carry around a calculator or appointment calendar? That’s cool–your phone can do that. You want to check your email or do your banking without lugging a laptop around? Your phone can do that, too. And of course, you can snap photos with the camera feature and send them to people. You don’t even have to wear a watch anymore.
On some phones, you can download music and short videos, and set your DVR at home. But who would want to do all that, and spend the money it takes to have access to all those features? Not me, certainly! However, I know one busy, tech-savvy career woman who travels a lot, and I have seen her gleefully shake her iPhone to come up with a map to a random restaurant location when I was with her in an unfamiliar city.
iPhone 3G
I don’t text. I have enough difficulty finding the numbers on the keypad, and it costs enough just to maintain phone service. I have trouble setting the time on my 4-button digital watch, though most men of any age can experiment with it for a few seconds and figure it out. And of course, a boy or girl of 8 or 10 would have no problem with it. 
holey molars
My parents, if they were alive today, would be amazed and proud to know that I still have more than half of my natural teeth. I am rather amazed, myself, since by the time I had reached my mid-thirties, most of my teeth had fillings, and several had been thought beyond repair, and so had been extracted. Consequently, before I was 40 years old, I was fitted with my first partial plate. It cost $250. I could not afford to get a lower partial, and so it was several years before I had a complete set.
Now, those same partial plates costs $1400 each. But after 25 years, I am having my old ones replaced tomorrow.
My parents were 26 and 28 years old when I was born. Both of them already had complete dentures! That was 1938; they had very little money, and that may have been the least expensive way to address the problem of teeth that needed continual work and probably caused them a lot of pain.
Those dentures lasted them the rest of their lives. Every night they soaked the plates, and every morning they patiently applied the paste liner that kept them fitting well enough that they could eat, talk, and sing without any problems that I knew of. I do recall that they occasionally filed off pressure points that began to bother them, though. I have no idea what they paid for them, but they were excellent dentures. My mother kept my father’s when he passed away in 1982; she was buried wearing hers.
I fully expected to be wearing dentures when I reached retirement age. Instead, I have 4 teeth that have never needed restoring, 8 teeth with fillings, 8 crowns, and one root canal. I can’t say I have ever enjoyed sitting in a dentist’s chair or paying thousands of dollars to keep as many natural teeth as I could. It is always a time of high tension when I have any work done–even routine cleaning. But with modern anesthesia and high-speed water-cooled drills, my dentist provides care that is as painless as possible.
Perhaps there will come a time when, as I saw in a popular science fiction series, people can have their teeth sealed against decay for decades, and when they do need to have a cavity repaired, all it takes is a brief touch with a chemical. Our methods will probably seem barbaric then.
