Today as my cell phone coverage wavered in and out while trying to discuss some important business with my wife, who was in the same town about five miles away, thus meaning we were most likely uing the same cell phone tower, I came up with my 5 Theses on cell phones (with apologies to Luther) which I will endeavor this afternoon to attach to the front door of the third-party pyramid scheme-style reseller's genuine particle-board booth down at the local Wal Mart.

Thesis #1 - Minutes are meaningless. Obvious are the reasons for the plans you entice us to buy into. Each time I call, the time is measured in units of a minute, so that if I speak for one second or 59 seconds, the cost is the same. If the telephone company can bill in 6-second increments, you can, too, unless you really can't be sure when connections are established or not, and thus would flirt with fraud if you tried to do so.

Thesis #2 - Form is not function. The shrinking of the cell phone has not reduced the troubles with them. At a certain point, the ability to send and receive signals will inherently become lost when the form factor shrinks below the physical charasteristics of the materials used, and this is bad. You will, of course, overcome this minor annoyance with a wide range of customizable covers and an advertising campaign featuring a duet by Trent Reznor and Anne Murray, which will so overwhelm the sense of good taste that we will buy them in droves.

Thesis #3 - Features are foofah. We do not need low-resolution digital cameras, nor do we need to watch TV on a screen smaller than our watch bezel, when we cannot be assured that the call we place at 10:00 will still be connected and audible to the recipient at 10:01. When the phone works as a phone should work, then additional features will help us. All these do is extort cash from either those with more gadget lust than common sense or our teenagers. The fact that they call incessantly to me from the Dark Side scares me, but not as much as the thought of the lead singer from Nine Inch Nails and the singer of Snowbird having anything musically in common enough to have a duet!

Thesis #4 - Kiosks are kitsch. When we see the same person manning a booth to try to sell us a phone that we saw last month trying to sell us a Kirby sweeper and the month before trying to sell us Cutco knives, it reinforces the thought that there is a sucker born every minute, so we need a booth opened every minute to keep up. The folks who work there mean well, but they often get the guarantees for the respective marketing companies confused. I have a Kirby sweeper, and it does work; I have a Cutco knife, and it cuts well. I have a cell phone, and the salesman was confused by the earlier products and seemed convinced that it would work as well. Maybe if attention was turned from marketing drives and funds were siphoned from research and development of new cases, those things could be applied toward thorough training and retention of personnel. Just a thought...

Thesis #5 - Addiction comes anyway. You supply us with the drug of choice - a portable electronic world where we can exist without regard to space, time or the human circadian rhythm. You provide us a way to feel important, because there is at least one person - often standing within 50 feet of us at the mall and just calling because of laziness or love of gadgetry - who wishes to come into contact with us without making an appointment or asking permission. You also allow us to be stalkers, but we won't go there. We can be as lewd, crude and ill-mannered as we wish when we use your products, because we can consider ourselves stepping into our own private offices even when we are discussing Aunt Martha's gall bladder operation in the middle of a crowded elevator.

May the spam of a thousand free e-mail systems infest your switches (actually, this may actually already have happened, so never mind)! May the sheer size of a complicated customized downloadable ring tone clog your bandwidth! May we not fall into the trap of thinking that newer has to automatically work better until we find out that it is true. And, in closing, may we all refuse to purchase another minute or phone from you until you give us detailed maps of the local area with reliable mapping information that shows where the signal goes away as you pass the fire station, where you hear that odd buzz because the radio tower and the cell phone tower have some odd harmonic effect happening, and where your pre-planned rolling servicxe outages are expected to strike next. Maybe then we can truly be a T-Mobile society with a Cingular purpose on the Verizon.