Who's On The Line?

Yesterday I went and got a new cell phone. I've been doing just fine without one for a while now, but figured that it wouldn't be a bad thing to have one just in case of emergencies. (To be truthful, my family made this decision for me at Christmastime.) The one I picked out is actually very cool with all sorts of newfangled features I will never, ever use. (Really, just send texts and receive phone calls and I'm good.) Anyway, the headache that comes with getting a new cell phone is that you have to transfer all of your old information over from one phone to another. While cell phones have come a long way, with things like built-in memory cards making for easy transferring of pictures or ringtones, it is still not as easy as it should be. For example, no matter how long I tried, I could not find a way to transfer all my numbers over in one big jump. I understand that some stores will do this for you, but by this point it was late in the afternoon and that would require leaving my nice warm house, driving to the store and waiting while they did it, which I assume would take about the same space of time as sitting at home and typing them in myself, only with the added hassle of trying to find my shoes. Therefore, I just decided to do it myself.

As I was sitting there, typing away (which was admittedly easier with the full keyboard, but still not as rapid a process as I would have preferred), I thought about how I almost never talk to most of the people on my call log anymore. Thus, I began editing numbers if for no other reason than to whittle down the amount of imputing I had to do. Basically the rule of thumb was this: have I talked to you since the year 2000 and do I remember your last name? Then you can stay. Everyone else needs to get out. However, there were some people I just couldn't get rid of, no matter how long it had been since I last talked to them and I feel like we all have these people on our contact list. They seemed to fall into one of the following categories:

The Possible References: You worked with them four years ago and haven't talked to them since, but you always liked them. You feel compelled to hold onto this number just in case you need someone to vouch for you, because you are sure they would... of course they would.

The 'Somedays...': People that faded away even though you never wanted them to. Your scheduled just got too busy or whatever, but man, you should call them. I bet it would be great to catch up with them. I mean, you're not going to do it right now, cause it's a random Tuesday night and that would be kind of weird after two years, but, yeah, eventually you're gonna call them.

The 'I don't know who this is': Crap, did you work with this guy? Is he a client? Is he someone you should know? Dammit, you can't erase this number unless you know you're not going to need it.

The Space Fillers: You know this number is no longer valid, but at some point you'll talk to this person and get their new number. In the mean time, it's just easier for you to enter their information now while you're doing everyone else's and edit it later.

The Warnings: These are the people that you don't want to talk to ever again. However, you need to keep their number in your phone to guard against the off chance they call you first, you don't recognize the number, pick up the phone and suddenly you're in an hour-long conversation with a person you never wanted to talk to in the first place. These numbers never stayed in the phone before caller ID.