Nextel Hobo Tech- A Breakup Story, By Darren Hanson

Nextel Hobo Tech - A Breakup Story

Words and Pictures by Darren Hanson

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So I have been trying to figure out the mechanics of rigging a giant rolling boulder in my house. Why? I anticipate a visit by Indiana Jones at some point that will end with me discovering a bag of sand where I left my cell phone plugged in to charge. I just want to make sure Dr. Jones stays on his toes.

Yeah I have an old cell phone and cell plan. How old? A couple years? Five years? No, it was handed to me up on Mount Sinai, and was a decent upgrade to the burning bush I had been using up to that point. (I always got stiffed by the hidden fees on those “peak” hours. Ha! Ha. Yeah.) Okay, maybe my old Nextel plan isn’t a gift from God, but it is a small miracle that I still have this thing going.

Back in the year of our lord 2001, I was an employee at CompUSA. Remember that place? They were a retailer who carved out a niche selling things like desktop computers, the Cotton Gin, and those airplanes with ten wings that hop up and down but don’t fly. They had a counter with hand-held PDA’s and flip phones and such that I didn’t care much about. I was never interested in having a cell phone. Until the rep from Nextel came to town to hawk her wares. CompUSA employee discount plan, huh? Okay, you have my attention, you naughty tech-sales vixen.

The deal was this. Buy one of the Motorola phones used by the Nextel network. One was a flip phone that I knew would break faster than any of my diets at a Chinese buffet. The other… well it looked tougher. If it were a person it would have the cauliflower ears of a prizefighter. The Motorola I88. With no movable parts, except a retractable antennae, it seemed this phone may be able to hold it’s own in the knick-knack death match coliseum known as my pants pocket.

The plan boasted 1000 minutes of talk time a month anytime. That’s a lot of minutes. I was currently getting by using 0 cell minutes a month. But to have 1000? Without worries of peak hours or calling during off-hours? I like when technology takes a couple dirty nibbles on my earlobe. Wait, hold on… the plan also has UNLIMITED Direct Connect! The hot feature hit parade keeps on coming. What is Direct Connect? Well, it’s like your phone is also a CB radio you can use to talk back and forth with other Nextel users. What’s a CB radio? Come on, go Blockbuster and rent the Smokey and the Bandit videocassette and find out!

It was just a matter of signing on the dotted line now. It wouldn’t be until much later that I discovered the joys of the “java” game Reversi. Oh and then there’s the ability to receive some kind of emails over phones… a kind of message made from texts, but through the phone? I discovered this eventually when I received a message that had a day/month stamp with a time. No name or phone number was attached. Who was it from? There was no way to tell. Also I could find no way to send these mystical messages. Not that I needed them, since I used the phone to call people. I want to strengthen my friendships with real communication, not impersonal little one-sentence messages. Also they charged an additional fee of 25 cents per message, so screw that.

With that I hoisted the sail and began my journey out of the harbor of high technology toward the future. It was looking bright. Gone are the days of me getting home from a night out with my friends to check messages at home wondering if there were any births or deaths while I was out having a good time. Now the evening can be ruined at any time during my adventures. How handy!

So it went for about five years. Then, like a child who refused to eat his dinner, the phone would no longer charge. “Incompatible Charger” it would say on the screen before powering off. For a time I could perform some bondage moves with rubber bands and such to keep the chord at just the right angle to charge. But it didn’t last. I needed a new phone.

I heard there were phones with color screens now! This was probably around 2006 and I was due for an upgrade. I quickly realized I didn’t want to spend $200 and up for a new phone. That was a lot of money. Keep in mind back in 2006, $200 was like $210 today when you adjust for inflation. And cell plans… $60 to $100 a month! I was paying $10 a month. I did what any person who prefers to blow his money on fancy cheeses than cell phone bills would do… got the new Motorola phone. The I88s. Yeah, the same exact phone. With an “s” added to the name. I kept the plan.

Fast forward to today. Yes, I have the same phone now. Yes, I still pay 25 cents per text message I get from people that I can’t identify. I used the direct connect feature with one friend who had a Nextel phone for his job for a couple years and that was it. So it’s been $10 a month for 1000 minutes anytime. No longer a friend with benefits. Still, my Nextel (bought out by Sprint in 2004) CompUSA (out of business since 2008) employee (stopped working there what, in 2002?) discount plan is still plugging along.

My Motorola I88s, well, to quote Han Solo “she may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.” Actually, it never did hold a charge well. I averaged about an hour of talk time on a charge. Which in hindsight probably kept me under the 1000 minutes most months. There were always problems charging as well. Signal strength is always hit-or-miss. The earpiece broke and I can mostly use speakerphone only. The retracting antennae would come out completely if you pulled too hard. Come to think of it, I kind of hate my phone.

That said, two things recently happened that spells doom for my cheap ride. For starters, Sprint/Nextel recently announced doom for the Nextel network. They are shutting it down in June. There it is, doom can’t be any clearer if it was on a 4G network. So now I MUST change my phone and update my plan. Doom!

The other thing happened when I was in the Subway in Boston waiting on the platform. I looked down at a panhandling hobo who was texting, web browsing, streaming Smokey and the Bandit or something on his smart phone. Mind you, not only can I not do those things with my phone, but also my Nextel phone doesn’t even get a flipping signal in the subway. I knew I was low-tech, but it never dawned on me that I was below hobo-tech. My phone surely has encouraged snooty glares from drunken drifters behind my back. Not good.

So I guess all good things must come to an end. So must all cheap yet disappointingly weak cell packages. A cell phone plan, a box of wine or a torrid relationship won’t last forever. But I gave Nextel the best years of my cell phone life! I stuck it out and put up with the dropped calls, poor coverage, boring features and I’m pretty sure that phone also snored; and now they are going to dump me? I could have been sexting with a better phone a long time ago! But I stayed by their side. I guess I hoped Nextel would change and we’d be happy again some day, like we were in the beginning. Now I face the prospect of starting over, playing the cell phone scene again. At my age I don’t know where I will begin, having been off the market for so long. I need to stay positive, look to the future and know things will only get better. I wish Sprint/Nextel all the best, and I hope they find what they are looking for with their future customers. But more importantly, I hope their next boyfriend is an asshole.