Trying a New Telephone

Patrick was not going to take the extra flip phone I had on hand with him to college.   He doesn't want to be responsible for it.  It might get lost or stolen.  Or whatever.  I was pretty frantic about it.  This isn't 1978 - it isn't as though you can find a pay phone around every corner.  What if something happened?  There would be no way to get in touch with him.

Patrick wasn't worried about it.  D didn't care - he figured he'll just borrow a phone from a friend.  I'm thinking by that line of reasoning, let's send him off with no tuition money or food.  Friends can help out!  Maybe he can just live in a tent on the campus lawn and save dorm costs, too!  Sigh.

Ok, so what if something happened to you or you needed help?  How would I know?  Well, he reasoned, you would recognise my dead body on the news, right?

Way to make poor old Mom feel ok about sending you off to school, tell ya what.  Thanks for that.  Please just take the phone.  Ughh... finally he agreed just to bring it and leave it in his dorm room.  At least if there were some emergency I would be able to get in touch with him at some point.  Maybe.

Our current phone plan allows for three cell phones, which means that with me, D and Patrick each taking a phone, the teens would have no way to contact me if I dropped them off somewhere.  To get another (crappy, no texting or internet) phone we'd have to buy some clonky thing and pay $200/ month.  Ehm... no.  I've signed up with Cricket so now we have five phones for $100/ month.  And I got the phones free. 

But they're new phones.  We don't really know how to use them.  They take photographs and give you the weather forecast. One can even text and (presumably) take nude selfies to send to all of one's friends or random strangers perhaps.

If you do get some odd message with no boobs or butt photo attached, you know it's the newbie here on the texting machine.  Wish me luck!