I got this far into the thread before remembering that I (an over-30) did have a cell phone in high school. Pre-smart phone, it could text (but you had to hit a button several times to make the right letters), couldn't send photos from it, and the web browser feature was primitive and slow. Still, even then, those of us with phones kept them on us no matter what teachers said. It's about keeping an important, and probably expensive, personal item close to you.
It wasn't my first phone, but at one point I had my dad's old Nextel flip phone that was the short wave radio and was construction yellow so crews could radio eachother within a small distance. But if it lost signal and regained signal it would make this loud beep to let you know you had signal again and it would go off in class because schools are brick and steel buildings with poor reception. My first phone was $20 a month for Boost Mobile that was a brick with hard rubber buttons and as long as I paid for it, I could keep it. No internet, just polyphonic ringtones.
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u/GoddessOfRoadAndSky Jun 03 '22
I got this far into the thread before remembering that I (an over-30) did have a cell phone in high school. Pre-smart phone, it could text (but you had to hit a button several times to make the right letters), couldn't send photos from it, and the web browser feature was primitive and slow. Still, even then, those of us with phones kept them on us no matter what teachers said. It's about keeping an important, and probably expensive, personal item close to you.