I’m tired today, and don’t have a lot of energy for memory-mining. As I was flopping around for something to write about, the phrase “phone it in” came to mind. 

• My parents, despite moving to Texas almost a decade ago, decided to keep the home phone number I grew up with, so people could still find them. It’s now connected to a retired iPhone, and gets mostly spam calls. But if you still remember my phone number from high-school, you can call my parents.
• I had a pager at some point. I don’t know why. It would have been 1994-95, at most. I was a boarding school teacher. I can’t imagine why I had a pager, but I did. 
• My first cell phone was a TeleTac 200 or 250. Looking at the pictures, I can’t tell. I got my phone in ‘95 and the 250 was new that year. I might have got the coolest gadget I could as my first phone, but I don’t know. It was a thick grey brick. It was for “emergencies” in my car, when I drove to and from Houston from my teaching job. Did it have a memory speed-dial? If so, Michele’s phone number must have been in there at some point. Remember monitoring your minutes? At one point 200 minutes seemed like a lot, and then it didn’t. Now I don’t think I could talk on a phone for 3-½ hours a month to win a bet. 
• I think my next phone was a Nokia 3310. It had a plug-in external earpiece and microphone. It was the only “cool” phone I bought until I joined the iPhone cult as soon as the iPhone 3g launched in 2008. Between those were a series of uninspired phones that kept changing when we moved for jobs between 2003 &  2005. Remember when moving cities would change who your cell phone carrier would be?