We didn't plan to get new cell phones. In fact, the heavy, over-sized black models we'd been using would have suited us just fine, for a long time to come, if our cellphone company hadn't offered us freebies.
     The only reason I'd called the provider was because my husband and I were paying for a lot of unused minutes. When the representative offered new phones at no charge, I remembered last week's lunch with my friend. I had been startled when her handbag burst into song—a show tune. She extracted a silver and royal blue cellphone, slim as a cigarette case, from her purse. As she flipped it open with a flick of her wrist, I wondered what it would be like to look so cool and sophisticated. Well, I was about to find out.
     All I had to do was sign us up for two years of shared minutes, the company rep said, and two new phones would be in our hands in a matter of days. Why not? I thought. Besides, the hip young guys my husband works with had been teasing him about the out-dated, honker of a phone he could barely fit his hand around. And the crack across the faceplate made it hard for him to see who was calling.
     The phones were delivered as promised in just two days. As I slid a knife along the tape on the cardboard box, I felt a twinge of excitement. Wow! You should see them: polished silver, slender as a thin mint cookie. Won't we be fancy?
     That night I showed my husband his new phone and told him about the deal I'd made. He got that fraidy-cat look on his face, much like a contestant on Fear Factor. I had forgotten I was dealing with a man who had never learned how to program a number into his phone and couldn't change the volume when he accidentally set it on vibrate.
     "I can talk you through this, honey," I said. "Before we can activate the new phone, though, you have to check the saved messages in the old one."
     "Huh? What saved messages? I didn't know I could save messages." It was all my fault. I had created a monster, doing everything cell-related for him. The parable about giving a man a fish vs. teaching him to fish came to mind. It was time to teach this man how to use his phone. "You can activate this yourself," I told him. "The Quick Start Guide is on the kitchen counter."
     "Isn't there a book?" he hollered, a few minutes later. "I don't know how to turn the darn thing on."
     "Everything you need is on that piece of paper," I hollered back, resisting the temptation to do it myself.
     "We went back and forth a few rounds, with him not knowing how to turn the phone on and my telling him to just read the piece of paper in front of him.
     Meanwhile, I was frantically scanning the 70 page owners' manual, wondering how we were ever going to learn to set up voicemail, text message, or download objects from a Web page. My goodness! There's even an alarm clock. I decided to come clean and tell my husband that the only thing I had figured out was how to turn the thing on and off. The rest was a mystery.
     I told him it was time to send for the cavalry. Time to call our granddaughter.