“Baloney!”

“130 dollars!” a customer shrieked at my wife.
“They got me for cellphone use while driving,” she said.
“Now I hafta pay a $130 fine, and certify the letter I send it in.”
My wife worked all day yesterday (Tuesday, October 13, 2009) at the tiny West Bloomfield Post-Office, where she works part-time as a “PMR” (postmaster relief).
“Well fine,” I say.
I have a cellphone myself, and when I drive it goes into my pocket. If it rings, I ain’t answerin’ — it’s goin’ to voicemail.
As far as I’m concerned, driving takes 100 percent concentration. A cellphone is a distraction, even hands-free.
To me, a cellphone is little more than a radio telephone.
It frees me from the landline network.
A while ago my wife was at Wilmot Cancer Center, and when finished she’d call me on her cellphone to come get her.
An older gentleman was across from her.
“Gotta get me one of them cellphones,” he said.
His daughter unholstered her cellphone, and said “Here Dad; can you see this?”
Her cellphone was displaying tiny numbers, and the keys were the size of match-heads.
“No,” he said.
“So much for you using cellphones,” daughter said.
“Baloney!” I thought. “I’m 65 years old. If I can use a cellphone, there’s no reason someone my age can’t.”
My current cellphone displays large numbers, and has keys larger than match-heads.
It hits me with mistypes occasionally, but I use it.
In fact, I use it for just about all phonecalls.
But I don’t upload belches to Facebook® with it.
Nor do I download tunes.
I have three extraneous applications on it; namely weather-radar, a GPS navigation system, and a contact-list backup.
My weather-radar can display weather-radar for some faraway location; handy when I’m not home.
I don’t use the GPS navigator. All I have it for is to tell me the coordinates for where I’m standing.
I got the contact-list backup after losing my contact-list when a previous cellphone got dunked.
That was a Motorola RAZR®, a really great gizmo.
My wife still has her RAZR. She kept it rather than learn a new cellphone. (My new phone is slightly different.)
But neither of us use our cellphones while driving.
Driving is more important.

• We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield in Western N.Y., southeast of Rochester.
• “Wilmot Cancer Center” is in Strong Hospital, in southern Rochester. My wife had lymphatic cancer. It was treatable with chemotherapy — she survived.
• “GPS” equals global-positioning-system, via satellite.