About a week ago, the display screen on my cellphone stopped working. As I am used to thinking of a cellphone as a complete collection of functionality, I dismissed the whole phone as broken and began the search for a new one. Shopping for cellphones is just above getting shot in the gut & bleeding painfully for several hours on my fun meter, so I've been procrastinating the task.

In the meantime, I've realized that my supposedly busted Nokia is still a completely functional telephone. I can't see who's calling, see if I have voicemail, read SMS messages, check the signal or battery strength, or dial using my phone book, but I can both call out (by manually dialing numbers) and receive calls no problem. All I need is a rotary dialing mechanism and I'm back to a circa-1980 telephone experience.

This entry was published on May 14, 2003 at 09:54 am.

kottke.org is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998. You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or an interesting link for me, send them along. Here's the kottke.org RSS feed .

Advertise on kottke.org via The Deck.

Many posts on kottke.org have been "tagged" with keywords, which activity results in collections of related posts like sports, infoviz, or bestof.

finance   video   johnhodgman   chess   movies   nyc   photography   tv   rogerebert   cycling   lists   color   food   flying   sports

movies   photography   books   nyc   science   food   lists   design   business   sports   video   weblogs   music   bestof   art

photography   economics   lists   bestof   infoviz   food   nyc   firstworldproblems   cities   restaurants   video   timelapse   interviews   language   maps   fashion   nsfw   remix  

sunshine   prison   cities   barcade   marypoppins   lifeafterpeople   realestate   cars   fundraising   hosseinderakhshan   fridakahlo   sony   pentagram   movies   im