I live in an area that is fairly remote. Even to get to work or school, you don't get in the car without the phone fully charged.
Back in the '90s, I was meeting friends for Chinese at the Nanking(?) in downtown Minneapolis (a landmark that is, sadly, gone). I was delayed or something, so I had to track down a pay phone(?) (I may have actually had a "dumb" cell phone by then, I forget) to page them. Because I was downtown and pagers and pay phones were favored by drug dealers the pay phones were apparently configured to not call pagers, IIRC. And on the other end my friends had to borrow the restaurant's business phone because the pay phone would not call a pay phone from downtown. Something like that. It was a long time ago.
(In around 2000) The manager of a semi local Mexican place thought I had stood flow up. I had a cell phone but he didn't and I had no way of finding the restaurants number. I think I was at least an hour late. The manager was sitting with him when I got there...pretty sure. :discanu: He may have gotten free stuff but I'm not sure.
The drug dealing thing was why schools in California had a cell phone ban until my junior year. As for having a cell phone, a kid under the age of ten doesn't need a smartphone, IMO....one with 911 and three pre-set phone numbers is just fine, and they can call their friends from at home.
I love my VCR. It's a JVC Pro-Cision 19micron. I've had it for about 7 years, and it runs like a champ. The one I had before that was a Sylvania 2-Head VCR. It was good, but it liked to eat tapes way too often for my liking. I still remember working at Hollywood Video, and splicing/repairing VHS tapes the customers would break. I rather enjoyed it. I had one girl ask me, "how do you do that?" I replied, "Oh, this? This is easy. A little tape and we're ready to go again. Now, the DVDs are what's really hard. I have to spin around really fast to manually rewind them, and that makes me dizzy." She just nodded.
Speaking of DVDs, anyone ever own a DVD recorder? I had two, which I got maybe thirteen months' use out of between the two of them. That was one technology that never got perfected.
All my drug dealer friends in high school had pagers. Cell phones were too damned expensive, even for them!
It was a pretty flawed idea, to be honest. It's why I don't like the mini-DVD camcorders. It's just asking for trouble to record on a one time use medium. You have any kind of trouble at all, and you've wasted a DVD which, at the time of those recorders, was expensive to replace.
The first one I had, I tried using to record my soaps on. I would always get teh 30 minute one, but the hour-long show that followed would always break up after fifteen to twenty minutes. That one became junk fodder really quick. The next one was a DVD/VCR combo that was almost exclusively used for transferring the few episodes of Voyager I could stand to re-watch again, and even that DVD side gave out after eleven months. But by then, the Vista computer I had could easily copy off of the cable feed anyway.
I used to own a Laserdisc player. It was given to me by a friend, and I had one Laserdisc movie, but I can't remember what it was. The player broke after a few weeks, though.
I have one (a Sony) in my home office. I sometimes watch movies on it, but I mostly use it to transfer my personal story archive to disc or to occasionally make DVD dubs for contests (not very often these days since the majority of contests we enter switched to online-entry a couple of years ago). It's hooked up to a $15,000 digital playback deck. At work, we archive all of our newscasts on DVDs using a consumer grade Toshiba recorder. I wish they'd spend the extra money for Sony because they're better and last longer, but for some reason they won't. Most problems I've encountered with DVD recorders had more to do with the quality of the discs than with the machine. Cheap DVDs have problems. Three or four years ago I had to redo about half of the station's Emmy entries because the person who bought the DVDs went cheap.
