Of Nokia Phones, angry cows and eco-husbands

My husband is the original eco-warrior–not the Prius-driving, hemp-wearing kind.  He spent a summer living in an enormous kiln once, just to give you an idea of his devotion to all things “green”.

I am the eco-prisoner.  This means I entertain the most absurd ideas he cooks up in his quest to completely eradicate his carbon footprint. I think about $200 boots to adorn my footprint. Watching him wrestle with his greenness is somewhat of a spectator sport and most recently the arena was his older-than-dirt Nokia cell phone:

The evil Nokia. Note worn buttons, filth and antique quality of this first generation cell phone.

He had his phone for years before I met him.  Three years ago,  Matt helped retrieve a neighbor’s cow from a muddy river bank.  She (cow, not neighbor) was thigh-high in morass.  It involved hours of digging mud, a roaring river, clouds of mosquitoes and one pissed-off cow.  The cow survived, but Matt’s phone sustained fatal injuries, being submerged in water and all that.  Despite trying to “dry it” (don’t even ask) the phone was DEAD.

Of course he had to have THAT Nokia.  The internet finally yielded an identical , outdated phone.  I believe the model was called “Luddite” or maybe it was the “carrier pigeon”.

Of course he couldn’t just throw the old phone out.  Technology waste and all that.  He couldn’t even dispose of it in a “green” way.  He kept his old Nokia “for parts”.  I laughed myself stupid, but as a “parts” phone is hardly a storage burden, who am I to complain?

Years have passed, and like in horror flicks, when the murderer is presumed dead, yet rises to do more damage, the damn Nokia kept coming back from impossible death knells.  Assaults from toddlers, construction site abuse, and what he refers to as my “thinly veiled attempts to kill a perfectly good phone”.

Until last week.  It still received calls, but the dial-pad-thingy didn’t work.  I got all excited because there is NO WAY this model is still available. Not even on Ebay.  Finally we can upgrade to a phone that makes us look like wage-earning adults!

Turns out.  We can’t.  Despite a recent move, the man knows EXACTLY in which storage box he squirreled away the damn “parts” phone.  Here is a picture of him showing off at the bottom of the basement steps:

Damn Nokia, with smug husband.

He fixed the phone.  IT WORKS.  So off I went to a Blogher conference in Boston (which rocked, by the way) with the damn Nokia, surrounded by women with iPHONES, Blackberries and a host of other, chic, pocket size technology.

I part with his loving quote:

“Your blog entry better end with you conceding I was right.”

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Tags: Blogher Boston, cell phones, cows, Nokia, technology waste

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