DanMargarita.com

When I made my first trip to Florida for my annual Spring Training trip several years ago, I made my first leap into modernity by acquiring an ATM card. Having once been stranded in the U.K. without any cash, I knew that traveling in the then-20th century would simply be a lot easier with the ability to get cash. The reason I’d been hesitant to get an ATM card was that I feared if I had constant access to my bank account, it would just be a matter of time before I no longer had a bank account.

My reluctance with getting a cell phone has more to do with nearly being run off the road by people chatting away on the cell phones while driving and I didn’t want to also wind up being a hazard to the general driving public. However, with enough people complaining to me about trying to reach me and the knowledge that in an emergency, a phone is a good thing to have, I ventured to my nearest Verizon Wireless store.

Picking something with some cool features, the next step was selecting a phone number. That seemed simple enough but little did it occur to me that it would be a phone number that somebody else once possessed. Thus, almost immediately I started getting calls for Joyce. If anyone reading this knows Joyce Martin, please tell her to inform her friends that she no longer has the same phone number. I seriously considered playing pranks on Joyce’s friends, for sure.

“Hi, could I speak to Joyce, please.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I guess you haven’t heard. They’re still trying to find the rest of Joyce’s remains.”

No, I couldn’t do that…but it did cross my mind.

What plan did I pick? The cheapest one available! Nights and weekends are free so anyone calling me after 9 p.m. or on a weekend won’t cost me anything. Of course, Joyce’s friends don’t know that, so I have to spend much of my minutes telling people that Joyce no longer has this number. Since the number is new to me and few of my friends have it, I have more people calling for Joyce than for me! Well, I guess that’s one way to make new friends.

It didn’t take me long to become “annoying cell phone guy.” The added benefit of being able to access email, another addiction of mine, made me even more annoying.

Yet, it soon proved its worth. After seeing the Red Sox game in Ft. Myers, my baseball traveling companions, Jim and Rick and I stopped for dinner at the Ft. Myers Ale House. Our waiter, an admitted Yankee fan (bastard!), informed us that Mike Lowell, the Sox third baseman, was sitting in the next aisle. I usually don’t like to bother celebrities when they’re in public. I figure that they get hassled enough. Nor am I an autograph seeker. I was cured of that at a young age when my sister Jean helped me draft a letter request for an autograph to Detroit Tiger’s slugger Willie Horton. I sent a letter along with his baseball card to sign. I never heard back from him or got the card back. Little did I realize he would go on to ruin the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. What? That was a different Willie Horton? Oh…sorry.

Anyway, I asked the waiter to ask Lowell if he would mind posing for a picture with me. He agreed to pose but wanted to do it after he was finished eating. When I saw him finish his dessert, I meekly approached him and asked if he’d pose with me. I gave his friend the camera and he took the picture of the two of us. Still learning how to take a photo with the cell phone, I thanked him and walked away, only to realize that I had accidentally erased the photo. I had to re-approach him even more meekly and explain that I was new to the technology and asked him if we could do that again.

“You have to save it” he explained.

The photo was pretty blurry, but I wasn’t about to ask him to pose a third time.

Rick learned the tough lesson of not having a cell phone when our game in Clearwater was called due to rain. Jim and I, both with cell phones, found each other but couldn’t find Rick. Since he was unable to locate us and couldn’t call us, he headed for our rental car. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the one with the keys and thus stood there in the rain waiting for us to figure out that he’d headed to the car.

Speaking of rental cars, there’s another technological leap that has occurred since my first S.T. trip. All rentals cars now seem to have to ability to unlock the car via a remote on the key chain. This has made the old days of wandering around in parking lots, trying to figure out which white rental car is yours, obsolete.

Well, it’s time to email this off to my editor now. It takes forever because I haven’t upgraded to high-speed internet yet.