Since my mission, I have had precisely six cell phones. Six cell phones in less than two years. That is an average of one cell phone every 3.6 months. It has been a blessing and a curse, the consequence of having a company phone (the company my dad works for), but not being part of the company.
The amazing thing is that only one of these six phones was damaged--phone #1. That phone died when it fell out of my pocket as I got out of my car on a stormy day. I didn't know I had lost it until I came back to my car, and it was sitting in the door handle. A kindly person, intending to help, had put it there. But unfortunately, it was the prefect spot to get permanent rain damage.
So I got phone #2. But only a few months later, the company switched from Verison to Sprint. Thanks to my dad, I got a really cute, hot pink Sprint LG. I sold phone #2 to my roommate, who still uses it to this day.
I loved phone #3 with all my heart. It was small. It was pink. It received love texts from a few summer flings. Okay... maybe that's an exaggeration. But after about 6 months of phone #3, the company switched back to Verison, and got us Blackberries--phone #4. Great, right? Well, sort of. I'm not the technosavvy type and was tired of having to reload my contacts into my phone every 3 months. But, hey, it was free. What do you do? So, I buckled down and learned how to use a Blackberry. I gave phone #3 back to Sprint to recycle it. If I only I had known what an ironically tragic mistake that was.
So after a couple months of Blackberry, I find out that, because I'm at the end of the totum pole and the company needs to switch out some numbers, my number AND phone are going to be swapped out. So, I get another blackberry--phone #5, with a new number (luckily only phone number change 1).
So, then we come to phone 6. After two and a half months of phone #5, it turns out that the company needs to terminate my service. So, I signed up for my own cell phone plan with..... Sprint. Yes, back to Sprint. And I got a free phone with the service, luckily. Yes, I was the one who decided to change numbers. I mostly did it because I thought it's time I have an 801 number if I plan on teaching in Utah. But it's such a shame I hadn't kept phone #3, because it was a lot nicer than phone #6.
So that is my cell phone saga. And, ironically, even though it was annoying to change phones so many times in two years, now that I'm locked into a two year contract and am looking towards two solid years with phone #6, it feels like much too long to wait to get a new phone. :-)