« Previous | Home | Next » May 18, 2006

Dumb Things I Just Stopped Doing
Just one in a very long series.

A few weeks ago, I called Cingular and stopped paying insurance on my phone. I have one of the first Bluetooth phones, the Sony-Ericsson t68i, which was supposed to work with Macs to get on the Internet via cell. "Supposed to" being the operative phrase.

It was pricey when I bought it, so back then, for a little while, the $3.99 phone insurance seemed to make sense. I just realized I was an idiot to be paying it still, and stopped.

Now, perhaps due to my midwestern girl roots, I see no reason to buy something new when I have something old that works perfectly fine, for my purposes. I have rather limited cellular telephonic needs: My phone must have a ringer which goes to vibrate (because I almost always leave it in vibrate, not wanting to bother other people). It must make and receive calls. It must store a few numbers. It must have call waiting and voicemail. Period.

No, no MP3 player, camera, or any other hoohah, thank you. And thanks, but I'll pass on the "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" ringtone. If you have it on yours, be glad I'm a libertarian atheist who doesn't believe it's right to kill another human being, because I will want to bludgeon you to death with your Treo when I hear it, but I will do my best to restrain myself.

Back to my phone, I am a bit annoyed that the cute red button on it fell off almost immediately -- bad design, Sony-Ericsson, that will make me hate you a little bit always. And just recently, I bought a mismatched battery from CellPhoneShop.com, so my phone uglier than ever.

Now, I don't like ugly, and I normally go out of my way to avoid having it in my life. I really miss my old American Motorola flip, which didn't have all sorts of crap on the hood like all the newer flips, and was tiny and cute, kind of like a silver OB tampon.

But, keeping this old Sony-Ericsson is a protest; first, against paying for a ugly new phone -- since phones available in America are ugly and not that high-tech, compared to phones available in Europe and Asia. Even my French cell phone, which is in France at the moment, being lent to a friend, is cuter than American cell phones, and it's about six years old! Here it is in a Melrose Ave. store window.

Not replacing my old Sony-Ericsson is also a protest against this culture where everybody's so up-to-the-minute with their phone; often because they're unable to detach themselves from it to actually relate to what's in front of them; and typically, while they're annoying the crap out of me at some high decibel. My favorite recent comment to some assclown doing this: "I just wanted to point out that I exist." (People around him clapped.)

Regarding whether you should insure your own phone, new or old, here's an article by Tim Harford on Slate debating whether it makes sense to buy insurance at all:

There is plenty of overpriced insurance around, always bundled with some other product. A popular cell phone retailer will insure your $90 phone for $1.70 a week—nearly $90 a year. The fair price of the insurance is probably closer to $9 a year than $90. Economists are rarely tub-thumping consumer-rights activists. We tend to believe that people are smart enough to fend for themselves. But the commercial success of this kind of insurance is perplexing. The pricing is grotesquely inflated, but something more fundamental is also going on. A rational consumer should scarcely look at this kind of insurance, even at a fairer price.

Most people like insurance because they dislike risks. Economists used to think that this tendency was rational: Your first million dollars is worth more to you than your second million dollars, so you should be reluctant to wager your first million on a coin toss. What you might win (your second million) is worth less to you than what you might lose (your first million).

That explains why people would want insurance for million-dollar risks, but not $90 risks. It is not at all clear that the $90 that you might lose if your phone is stolen is so much more significant than the $90 you might "win" by not paying for a year's insurance.

You might protest that not all of us are millionaires. But a million dollars is just $25,000 a year for 40 years—less than most of us make in a lifetime. And since we can borrow or save to spread the cost of windfalls and disasters across the years, the million dollars is the relevant figure. Compared to a million dollars, a coin toss for $90 is trivial.

Oh yeah, and one last thing: a warning. When Cingular shut off my insurance charge, they also shut off my voicemail. I didn't know that until it was too late -- after I'd missed my boyfriend's phone notification of his arrival at the airport, so I was sitting around at Yamashiro wondering why I hadn't heard from him, while he was sitting around at my house wondering how the hell he was going to reach me.

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