My Samsung Cell Phone

Over the summer, I was re-initiated into American culture by degrees. It started with the usual eating greasy foods, going to amusement parks, using a GPS. As time went on I began to get closer and closer to normal and by the time the summer was ending I knew the time had come.

I had to get a phone.

I knew my service would be AT&T. That was the plan some relatives were on and I would be able to tag along. This in mind, I went online and began careful research to determine which phone I was interested in. I had several very careful criteria I would be basing my decision on:

1) Is the phone aesthetically pleasing?
2) From all angles?
3) In terms of the software as well as the design?
4) Were the texts organized into conversations?

By the time I finished my research, I ended up discarding criterion #4. That left me with one very clear choice: the Samsung Impression.

This phone was everything I could have dreamed of in a phone. It looked good, it had a slide-out keyboard, it looked good, and it was aesthetically pleasing. The marketers cleverly concealed the fact that it didn't organize texts into conversation threads, but that wouldn't have mattered. This phone screamed sophistication.

We went to the AT&T store shortly after my research was concluded and, sure enough, there it was. The Samsung Impression, as gorgeous as it was online.

It sat there with that confident, I'm-sophisticated-enough-not-to-be-flashy coolness. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. Perfectly balanced.

I glanced down at the card that articulated its features. And oh man. That phone could do anything but fly.

There was no need to look at other phones. My mind was made up.

My older brother, Cole, was also in the market for a phone at the time. He went for the Pantech Pursuit, to avoid us having the same device.

What a fool.

It might have been free with the service plan instead of costing almost $200 extra and it might have had conversation-threaded texting, but oh, he was the loser in this game. My phone was sleek and black and sophisticated. His phone was green and wide.

What a loser, I said to myself. Ha ha ha.

This was not the case, as time would prove.

However, at the time I was overjoyed and I made us race home to read the manuals and download apps and discover all the marvelous options our new technology offered. As soon as we got home, I wrung the manual open and scanned through. Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy.

"Yeah," said the Impression. "Dude, check this out. You can get on Facebook and Twitter from anywhere in the world, and you can hop on the internet and YouTube and you can put widgets on my home screen and you can move them around and you can change my background and stuff, and you can take pictures with three megapixels and you can edit them on the go."

I was the happiest kid in the world.

I didn't care that the conversations weren't threaded, which meant I had to spend a minute and a half scrolling through the inbox to find any given message a person had sent me. This phone was the best part of my life.

I texted anyone I could whenever it was possible. This was sort of a limited activity because I had approximately one friend in the United States with a cell phone. But I made it work.

And over time more of my friends from Thailand started to come back to the States and get cell phones and I started to make friends in America and I downright abused my texting faculties.

And then one day something funny happened.

I didn't get a text.

Which wasn't weird in itself because I was accustomed to long time spans where no one acknowledged my cell-phone-self's presence. But it was weird because my mom said my dad had sent me a message. And why in the world hadn't I gotten it?

No worries. The Russians probably just shot down a satellite or something right as the message entered it.

No worries. My phone was fine.

And then a couple more days went by, during which I, for some reason, entered a texting lull. I didn't send or receive any texts during that time because my life was kept occupied, so I didn't notice anything unusual. Just that I wasn't texting much.

And then came the day when Mom and I were at Taco Bell and I needed to tell Dad that Mom and I were done shopping and would be home soon and to put the meat on the stove. I punched in the message, hit send, and then my phone got weird.

It just sat there on the Sending... screen, the little periods scrolling out and disappearing like the phone was thinking. But nothing was happening.

I sat staring at my smug little phone for a whole minute. And then I canceled the text. I checked the reception.

Five bars. Pretty good reception for Nebraska.

I tried sending the text again. My Impression just sat on that Sending... screen, so I gave it some time to work things out and ate a few tacos. I checked back.

That was a lie. This message was not sending. Lying little Impression. In my anger I turned the phone off to give it some time to reflect on its behavior. When my anger had subsided, I turned it back on.

It spent some time initializing its messaging capabilities and then all of a sudden its alert screen popped up.

7 NEW MESSAGES!!

Oh my gosh. Seven new messages! That was 3.5 times as many messages as I had ever had unread on my phone at one time.

I eagerly leaped into the inbox. There was the message from my dad from several days ago, a message from my future roommate and then several more from an assortment of other people including a couple "text me bak wut are yoo doing fool?" messages.

I freaked out and started texting everyone to clear things up as fast as I could. I sent all the messages without a problem and then, relieved, set down the Impression and glared at it.

What are you up to, phony?

"What are you talking about? I'm just doing my thing. Sending messages and stuff wanna check Facebook?"

Okay sur- No! Look me in the eyes.

It didn't. And after a few more test messages to myself I was convinced that it was just a random fluke and that my Impression was still a sophisticated piece of high tech gadgetry.

I was so wrong.

The problems developed over time. About a month went by and things seemed okay -- but every now and then I realized that I had typed two letters where I meant to type one, or forgotten to insert some letters. This was unusual because I'm the world's biggest perfectionist*, but I wrote it off as human error.

Foreshadowing.

One day I was expecting a text from a friend and it just wasn't coming. I felt like I was being stood up and I was starting to get peeved. Finally, my annoyance building, I wrote them an angry text, capped it with exclamation marks, and hit send.

Sending.... . . . . . .

Oh man. I'm the world's worst friend.

I turned the Impression on and off as fast as I could, waited for the messaging to initialize, and sure enough -- 3 New Messages.

"Mr. Impression," I said coldly. "What are you playing at?"

"You know very well what I'm talking about. Is there a setting I have wrong? Is this a user feature? Am I hitting the wrong button? Talk to me."

It didn't. And so I went home to talk to Mr. Internet.

I googled "samsung impression issues" and I just wasn't even prepared for the onset.

"Why won't they recall the impression?"

"Almost daily errors with my samsung impression!"

"Samsung impression errors???????"

"Shouldn't have bought this phone!!"

I followed a link to a forum where dozens of users were all complaining about the issues they were having. "It stops receiving messages and I have to turn it off and on to get it to work again," said one guy. "The frequency that this happened with increased over time. Right now it's every 37 messages."

What a specific, fateful number. Thirty. Seven. Messages.

I read on. That was the most prevalent problem, but certainly not the only one. "Sometimes it types two letters when I hit it once," said another forumer, "or else it doesn't recognize a key press. Makes me look like a sloppy typer."

It wasn't my fault. I was still typing like a pro. It was this demonic little device.

I stared coldly at the evil little gadget. It had cost me respect and joy. It had sabotaged my texting life. And the worst part -- it was only going to increase its reign of terror.

In response, I declared war on my Impression.

It was under the two-year protection of AT&T, but thankfully it only had a few weapons to use.

It had the fact that every certain number of texts, it would refuse to accept more texts until it had undergone a reboot. I quickly reached the 37 message limit, which appeared to be the lowest it would go.

Second, it would mess with my grammar.

And finally, it would occasionally disable the alarm clock without warning in an attempt to sabotage my morning schedule.

It had a variety of lesser glitches which would crop up from time to time -- disabling silent mode, changing the alarm times, forgetting about tasks I entered -- but I could ignore these.

The other three glitches I took on in force.

Whenever I had gone a day without any new texts, I would text myself or reboot the phone to make sure that I was still getting texts.

I started telling my friends that using multiple letters in my texts was my new style. "i doo ths on puurpose"

And I bought a clock.

We started a war against each other, me and my Impression. We threw our worst blows at the other, but in time we reached a stalemate. It couldn't sabotage my life and I couldn't coerce it into behaving like a normal phone.

And that's where we are today. An uneasy peace. A careful truce.

Me and the Impression.


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*not entirely factually accurate
Note: Cole's Pantech, threaded-conversation and all, still runs perfectly to this day.