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"Ring! Ring!"

Remember that sound? It's the sound your old telephone used to make and the sound I wish they all made now. I'm sick to death of cell phones and home phones, too, that play everything from hard rock to classical or worse, some stupid little voice message that tells you in ten minutes what an old phone could tell you in one.....we're not home. Call back.

I never thought I'd say this but I'd love to have an old dial phone again, one of those that weighed forty pounds and sat on the coffee table in the den. When it rang there was never any doubt it was ringing. You didn't have to differentiate among five or six cell phones inside the house as to which one to pick up.

And after four or five rings the caller knew you either had gone out or you were dead. Simple. No confusion. No extra "Beep" and then having to listen to someone leave a message as long as the Gettysburg Address.

I liked being able to take the phone off the hook whenever I wanted some privacy. The caller didn't have the option of chatting with your machine and thereby irritating the crap out of you while you were taking a nap or in the bathroom. He just waited and called later.

Answering machines, useless little things that keep us all stirred up and more or less morally obligated to return the call to Tom, Dick, Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice or whoever happens to dial your number.

Cell phones gall me even more. I'm so sick of hearing music everywhere I go, especially music that requires I double-up on my nerve medication to survive the fifteen minutes I'm in the grocery store or standing in line at the mall.

Then there's all that money we spend for the priviledge of owning those little cancer-breeders (look it up). Not only am I charged for calls I make to you, I'm charged when you make calls to me! Hey, I didn't ask you to call me in the first place. It never fails. I'm sound asleep and my cell phone rings and scares the livin' daylights out of me, I pick it up, certain some tragedy has befallen someone in my family.

"Hello?"

"Uh, uh, is Rodriquie dare?"

"I'm sorry," I say, relieved I don't know this guy. "You must have the wrong number."

"Uh, sorry 'bout dat."

Thirty seconds pass and the phone rings again.

"Uh, hey man, lemme speak to Rodriquie."

Uh, and I got charged for those calls!

And how about the latest "ringtone" on many cells? You dial the number and immediately a computer activated voice says, "Please enjoy the music while your party is reached." Say what??

If my party is not there or is otherwise indisposed, fine. Don't make me listen to some ear-piercing music I don't even like while I wait to see if "my party" wants to talk to me. Either answer your dang phone or turn it off. I'm not letting my ear get cancer just because you have bad manners or are on the toilet.

Cell phones are too complicated to suit me. They have little computers in them now (called text messaging, where you actually type messages back and forth), they check your email, make your schedules, even take pictures! Now that's just what we needed, didn't we? A phone that takes pictures. Of what? The back end of the car you just slammed into?

You have to constantly recharge the things. That takes an enormous amount of time that you could be using more wisely, like, say, writing someone a letter, reading, or maybe even trying to push your IQ into double digits.

Cell phones encourage stupid people to become public menaces. Forget about the fact that talking on cellphones while driving is illegal, it's asinine. Some people even text-message while they're driving! Can you say MORON?? These people should be locked up, along with those who drive and at the same time put on makeup, clip their fingernails, brush their hair, read, write, or take a nap.

I'm convinced, dear hearts, that not everyone needs a cell phone. Kids under the age of say, 10, simply don't need a cell phone. I mean, how important could their calls be? At 10 you should stay pretty close to an adult all the time anyway.

Unless you're a drug dealer, must you really have access to other people every minute of every day? And, if we left all the cell phones to the drug dealers imagine how easy it would be to catch them.

And all this cell phone company competition makes me tired. They all have bugs in them, not a one is flawless. Invariably you'll be carrying on a nice conversation with your longlost aunt in Hahira and, beep! the call is gone, dead, kaput. At least with our old reliable black dial-up table phones we could finish a conversation without fear of ending our conversations in mid sentence.

A telephone should have one purpose and one purpose only. To talk on it. Not to e-mail and not to take pictures. It doesn't need a color screen or to be able to play a hundred and one latest hits. It's a phone, people. Remember that. Just a [bleeping] phone.