Goodbye Smartphone

I've decided to cancel my Smartphone plan and revert to a "feature" phone.

I'd love to say the main issue is the cost (Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of getting ~$30 a month back to spend on other things) but I think I would be lying..

I can't stand being always reachable by so many different methods.



Currently, I can be reached by:

1. Email on my DROIDX


2. My Work provided Pager


3. My Cellular phone number


4. My On-call phone when I'm at work.

All of these, except for #4 are with me at work and at home.

Now, added in with those, let's take a look at other connected ways I can access information:

1. Personal Windows Machine at home


2. Work provided Laptop


3. iPad


4. cr-48

That's a total of 8 ways to access information/communicate with people at home/work. On a given day, I have 6 of them with me. At home, I have 7. SEVEN different ways to get in touch with me...

...Do I really need to be that accessible? AM I really that important? I'm going to with, Mostly.

I am responsible for several servers, and my team does have business hours on-call paging, but let's be realistic here: What I do is not "Patient Critical" or Super time sensitive. If there is an issue on the weekend, 9.9/10 times it can wait until Monday morning. I don't need to be constantly interrupted on the weekend by emails that can wait. If something comes up during the day, we get paged, not sent an email. If someone needs to reach me immediately, they either page or call my OCP/Cell.

If something goes wrong with a server, I do get pinged on it, but I could easily redirect those emails to my pager. If one of my servers/services goes down, it will most likely be a hardware issue, and my boss and his boss and I decided to have next business day for all parts, and for the "critical" pieces, we have support contracts that the vendors will be alerted by the servers themselves and they will come out and do the repairs with no interaction from me, other than to authorize their entrance to the data center.

So that brings me back to the immediate contact issue. If I dump my DroidX, that leaves me with two options instead of three...

To me, Two out of three Ain't Bad.