Who carries three cell phones?
I was out for dinner at Fukisushi in Palo Alto this evening, enjoying some excellent spider rolls and giant clam sushi. A few minutes after we were served, a young couple came in, perhaps meeting for a date after work. At first I noticed that the man had the same cell phone (a Nokia 6682) as my wife, as he took it out and set it on the table next to him. Then he took out a Motorola Razr, flipped it open, and set it on the table next to the Nokia. I’m thinking that this is somewhat geeky and he should be paying more attention to his attractive blonde companion, but he looks like an engineering or tech operations kind of guy, and this is Silicon Valley, so maybe he has a work phone for being on call and a personal phone. But then he pulls out yet another phone, flips it open and sets it down next to the other two, creating a sort of mini-console of cell phones on the table next to the sushi plates.
Now I’m confused. I can think of lots of reasons why someone might have two cell phones. I can’t think of any good reason to park three cell phones on the table while on a date, though.
I don’t think he actually used any of them, except to take a photo of his companion with the Nokia.
Personally, I’ve been cutting down on the hardware I carry for some time now. At one point a few years ago, I often carried two PDAs, two cell phones, and a pager. That didn’t last long. These days I try to stick with one phone, as small as practical.
This episode makes me laugh, because I’m more puzzled by this guy carting three phones around than him parking them on the table in the middle of his dinner date.
Tags: palo alto, geek, culture
July 21st, 2006 at 12:50 am
When I lived in Europe a friend of mine had two sim cards in one phone that both worked at the same time. It was pretty cool, he had his work and his personal numbers in the same device and simply filtered the calls with different ring tones. I don’t know if the double sim card phone is common but if I ever needed a second cell phone it would certainly be my preferred device.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:38 am
My guess: a mobile developer testing a service?
August 1st, 2006 at 10:18 pm
I have three because I was switching from Sprint to T-Mobile. My Sprint phone’s mike stopped working, I could hear people but they couldn’t hear me. It has all my numbers in it so I had to take it around with my new t-mobile because I didn’t have time to enter all the new numbers. I couldn’t cancel my Sprint phone because they wanted to charge me like 150 USD to do it so it made sense to just wait a couple months untill the contract naturally expired. The third phone was my work phone….I’m too cheap to use my personal phone for work calls. So that’s it. Three phones. BTW..I’m wriiting this from Narita’s United Red Carpet Club. Did you know Narita opened up the new concourse. It has lots of new shops (high end of course: Hermes, Coach, Armani, RL etc) Nice blog!