Tags
AT&T, college aged kids, data charges, Family, Italy, letters, parenting, smartphones, studying abroad, teenagers
I’m a bit frustrated with smart phones lately. Instead of making life easier, this cute little device with the pretty colors and smiley faces is costing me a fortune to be more harried than at any other point in my life.
My son’s middle school is having a seminar on Smart Phone Usage for Tweens & Teens. I’ll tell ya what’s smart usage – not letting tweens and teens have a smart phone in the first place.
Easy going 16 year old son’s phone is not holding a charge, he announced yesterday with the same passion I’d like expressed regarding studying for the SATs. I know how worried you are that he won’t be able to get the Tottenham HotSpurs/Manchester City soccer score in real time. Oh, the agony.
My daughter is spending a semester in Rome. She should have left her phone home as calls to AT&T to unlock her phone and demand I pay more fees for an international data plan had me wishing she could communicate like I did when I went to Europe in college. Here is a step by step guide to a newfangled idea I’d like to introduce to my family:
- Fly to the Himalayas where they are on the cutting edge of fast growing environmentally friendly Eucalyptus trees to be made into paper.
- Log – pulp – paper. You can enjoy the sites while you wait for this process to be completed something you wouldn’t be doing if you were on your smartphone/instagram/snapchat etc.
- Get a small device filled with ink also known as a pen.
- Using the pen, write down your communication on the paper using both sides to be sure you don’t need to fly back to the Himalayas for more paper.
- Put letter in a piece of folded/glued paper also known as an envelope.
- Seal the flap.
- Write the person’s name and address on the envelope.
- Buy a stamp, affix it to the envelope and put in the mailbox.
While I wait for your letter, you can enjoy the Vatican, the Colosseum and those little out of the way places most tourists never find.
Arrivederci!