Once again it is time to give homage to guilty pleasures.

I hate cell phones. In my opinion, they are the worst invention man has ever created. They have flooded our populous and become more of a commodity rather than a luxary. You don't need a car. You don't need a house phone, but by God, you have to have a cellular phone or people will just look at you funny. Almost like you are living in the stone age without one. Quite honestly, there are two things people will ask you for and if it isn't your screen name, it will be your cell phone number. Not your house number, your cell phone number.

Over the years cell phone have simply taken over. Remember when pagers were the cool thing to have? Who needs those when you can have a cell phone that does almost everything? I imagine that companies like SmartBeep are out of business. And with cell phones becoming more technologically complex, they are starting to replace other things. Who needs to take cameras anymore when you can have one right on your phone. So much for no picture taking in theatres. No need for a computer because a person can now check their email and even surf the internet right from their phone. Even AOL Instant Messanger has been built into phones. Even newer are the phone/PDA hybrid. Talk on a phone, surf the web, and organize your day all at the same time. Gotta love technology.

Now you would think with all of this, cell phone would be a good thing, but is it? To me, we don't own the cell phones, they own us. We are so reliant on them that when they are taken away, we don't know what to do. Sometimes it is so bad that we mourn the loss of our communication devices as if it were a person. Someone here at OSU broke her cell phone and cried because she wouldn't be able to use it. But she didn't stand for that, she worked her hardest to fix that little thing and now she is mobile again.

And you know that you cannot simply turn it off. No, that phone stays on all the time, even when it is charging. Many high schools have gone about banning the phones at their classrooms. They disrupt class and cause a distraction, but you know students won't have that. Even here in college, where people are generally adults, it is not rare to see, or rather hear a cell phone going off in the middle of a ver large lecture. Simply cannot turn them off. No, the best we can do is put them on vibrate. I mean, what if we miss an important call?

Here is a fun hands-on experiment. When you are out in a public place where people are stagnant (a lecture hall before class starts, a bus, or something like that) take out your cell phone and start playing with it. A little while later look around and see what other people are doing. I guarentee that they will have their cell phones our doing the exact same thing. Hell, I've done it before. Someone takes out a cell phone and you wonder if you have a message or something. Some folks just take it out to show, "Hey I have a celly too and mine is better." Try it and see how sad it is.

Since we all simply must have a cell phone, because if we didn't, the government would probably rally us all up and commit a mass extermination, we must have the best features on them. Because of course, cell phones aren't just for talking anymore. No, they have to be used to occupy all of our time. We have to have the best ring tones, games, and other features. Often these phones come with a bill going over $100. A friend of mine paid close to $300 for a peice of electronic equipment. He isn't paying to communicate, but he is paying for everything that phone can do. In my head, $300 is a quarter of books. $300 is a payment on my car. But to him and most of the world, it's a new toy.

And lets face it, cell phones are a status symbol. Remember when your car was a status symbol? If you were a teenager, it was simply the fact that you had one made you cooler than everyone. As you got older, it became what type of car you had. Now, like cell phones, it's not just what type of car you have, but what features it holds. And just like our cars, we put a lot of money into our phones. But for what? For one day, you can say you have the best phone, but then a few days later a better phone will come out and you will be scrambling to buy that. A guy who lives down the hall from me seems to have a new phone every week and it comes out of his money. The other day, I sat there and watched him and my roommate talk about how cool his phone was. All I could think was, why are you spending this much money to talk? I mean, strip away all that other stuff and that's all he is doing.

I am guilty of it too. I used to have that big clunky phone that everyone one had. You know, the one made by Nokia. Well, I wanted to be more up to date and more cool so I spent $79 (pennies compared to others) to get a new phone. It was a sign of status. People would look at my phone and say it was cute because it was so small. That felt good and if I ran off of things like that, I probably would have a newer cell phone now. In fact, if it weren't for my Explorer, I would be trying to buy a camera phone now. Why? Because you are not civilized without one.

So I would just like to personally thank the creator for granting us cell phones. He has brought us out of the days of darkness when we could only communicate when it were necessary. I just can't fathom what our parents did without them.