For almost a year, I've been waiting for my cell phone to die. It's at least four and a half years old. The thing is I want a new one but I can't justify buying a new one seeing as my current (but aging) phone is still working. Somehow, it continues to plug along. Alternately this makes me proud and frustrated. But I do have a lot of respect for my phone. A lot of other phones would have given up the ghost by now.

Not mine.

It has lived in both Bulgaria and the United Sates. It has have traveled extensively with me from Morocco to the Ukraine, Amsterdam to Sarajevo and Kosovo to Istanbul. This phone has served me well. The thing until recently I haven't really been able to figure out why it has survived for so long. It's not like I treat it especially well tossing it into my bag, dropping it on the floor and the like--but it's not like I've tried to drown it or dropped it from an obscenely tall buildings.

Then over the weekend I read this piece that ran in the NYT Style Section titled: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/fashion/20Cultural.html?src=me&amp;ref=homepage" target="_blank">Don't Call Me, I Wont Call You</a>. I read it and thought: Yes. This is exactly right.

My current cell phone hasn't died because I don't use it. <!--more-->Sure once in a while I check the time on it but more often than not just carry it around. Sometimes I jot out a quick text message but my phone doesn't ring that much. And it's not like I don't have friends. We just set up most of our plans via email, in person or via text message.

I think that this is because the majority of my friends are expats. I also think that there's a sense that no one wants to be the one to impose. As the article bluntly states:
<blockquote>Phone calls are rude. Intrusive. Awkward.</blockquote>
Only after living in Bulgaria, this struck me as a very American assumption--that phone calls are rude or that you might be interrupting someone by calling them.

anted I haven't live in the States for two and a half years but when I lived in Washington DC the telephone trend was already headed this way.