Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Recently I’ve been trying to talk myself out of getting a new mobile phone. It’s been years since I actually bought one, though Ido tend to steal Nikki’s cast offs and stick various SIM cards in them. However, now that I’ve got a bit of money, I keep thinking “Yeah, I should get a new phone. One with a camera. And an MP3 player. And GPRS. Maybe I should just get a 3G phone! I could video phone people. Hey, this is a nice handset, with handwriting recognisition…” And so on until I suddenly find myself looking at a £40 a month contract with a £150 handset on top. I don’t remotely need that type of phone. I can’t really even afford that much. I think I’m just severely lacking in gadgets and spending day upon day categorising the best deals in consumer electronics is starting to take a psychological toll on me.

So, let’s try and be objective here. What reasons are there to get a new phone?

I want GPRS. I am regularly annoyed that there’s no internet nearby where I can look up prices for the DVD I’mconsidering buying, or get a map of the location I’m currently wandering aimlessly around. GPRS would fix that. It’d also give me the ability to IRC on my way back from work, which would be a novelty at least.

I am currently lacking in serious gadgets. By comparison to not only my friends, but the general social trend, my phone is next to useless. It can text people, it can phone people, ad it’s an alarm clock/watch, but besides that it might as well be a sodding paperweight. Where’s the digital camera? Where’s the java version of lemmings? Where’s the MP3 Player? There’s so much mor eit could do, and so many functions that I’m just plain missing out on. I have a reputation to uphold and yet here I am without the ability to send a video message.

That’s it, really. Let’s face it. I don’t need a new phone any more than I need a kick in the head. I know I said “objectively” earlier, but all I’ve got is a bunch of non-reasons that boil down to “I really want one.” Anyone who remembers my years of agonising over buying a new monitor, despite the fact my current one was approaching unusable will know that I hate actually spending money on stuff I don’t need (except for DVDs and comics, of course) I’m still languishing without a bookcase because £25 seems like a lot of money for just a bookcase that while I “need” I don’t actually need so you can imagine the problems involved in signing away 12 x ~£20.

However, the biggest point to ridicule is that I don’t spend remotely close to what the minimum contract I can get would cost. There’s no point buying a handset for £200 because that’s just bad value, but no contract I’ve found is small enough that it’ll be cheaper than the £5 a month I’m currently spending. I know I could expect to use more than that if I had a contract, but what’s the incentive there? I can do more stuff, for four times teh cost? Damn fucking right I’d better be able to! Each £15 I’m not spending on a phone contract is £15 that’s going towards comics and DVDs and more bookcases than I know what to do with.

Rationally, economically, it makes zero sense and the only reason I want one is because I’ve been brainwashed by the corporate media and yes, yes, all that anticapitalist stuff which I know makes a lot of sense and that I can see as plain as day, so I’ll probably just avoid buying a new phone for many months to come. But god damn, if it isn’t tearing me up inside.

Okay, with that out of the way I promise the next entry will involve things more relevant than “I am too poor to justify wasting money on a cool yet expensive new phone” because there’s a fair amount of concern that this is all temporary insanity brought on by work, because this much consideration shouldn’t be going onto matters so trivial. Tomorrow it’s back to stuff that matters: Kirk or Picard?