At Long Last, an iPhone for this Mommy

I’m probably the last person in the Bay Area to have a smartphone. I’ve been using a flip phone for years, mostly because my husband was adamantly opposed to it. While I was working at a Fortune 500 company, I had a Blackberry and a cell phone, and the iPhone was just coming out. I felt overwhelmed with so many gadgets and then had to always be available — it was like having a leash around you. Now we have iPhones, which is even more distracting. All the stuff you can do!  Or maybe, all the stuff we missed out on doing things the old fashioned way. We finally decided to get iPhones for many reasons: I was printing out maps from Mapquest  and still getting lost. If we couldn’t remember the name of a restaurant, we would call people up and ask them to look it up online for us. The texting took forever. I work in social media so needed one for work (I hope none of my clients are reading this and if they are, I have an ipad that I’ve been using for mobile strategy). It was also plain embarrassing to be seen with a flip phone because it is, in many ways, a fashion accessory. I know (and you know who you are) some of my friends were horrified about my lack of smartphone fashion sense, but at least I was accessible while mobile and could receive and send texts. So now I have an iPhone and I’m not sure if it is better. The good thing is that now I have recent photos and videos of my kids (I rarely took photos of them because I had to pull out the point-and-shoot) and I’m texting lots of people the most mundane of texts because I like the conversation bubbles that appear on the screen. But the thing I’m paranoid about is getting my phone stolen. The biggest crime in our neighborhood  is smartphone thefts. Because the iPhone costs about as much as small diamond studs, my husband  and I are treating our phones like delicate flowers.  We haven’t had time to buy cases or skins so currently gingerly place the phones whenever we put them down. We keep them out of reach from our kids and have decided they will never be allowed to hold them or use them. We also won’t talk on them in public for fear of being robbed.  So what’s the point of having a phone if you don’t want to talk in public? And because I don’t have a case for my phone yet, I’ve been keeping it in an old cosmetic bag that looks like a watermelon slice that belonged to my sister. This watermelon cosmetic bag defeats the point of trendiness and fashion forwardness, but maybe this will deter it from getting stolen. –Eunice Park