Mark KennedyHere's my motto: If it's not broken, don't replace it.
This philosophy creates some discomfort at my house, but my wife and two sons generally shrug it off as "Daddy being Daddy."
When a debate does arise, it's often quibbling over the precise definition of "broken." I maintain that things are unbroken if they retain most of their basic functionality. This, I have learned, is not a universally shared opinion.
Among the things in our house I do not consider "broken" -- in any troublesome way -- are an electric clothes dryer that beeps incessantly, a screen door that flaps in the wind, a buckled section of carpet in our bedroom, a paint scratch the shape of Kentucky on our Toyota Venza and a moth-eaten pullover sweater in my clothes closet.
On the other hand, things that I recently conceded were indeed broken enough to replace included a clothes washer that required a bucket brigade to drain, a couch with a hole patched with duct tape and a broken rear differential in one of our cars that sounded like an anguished cat.
Most unsettling to my wife and sons had been my inability to admit that we all needed new cellphones. My son had a dumb-phone which he treated like the brick it was; my wife had an iPhone that would not send email; and I had an iPhone that was low on memory but was otherwise functional -- which, looking back, probably accounted for my lack of urgency.
I worked up the courage to go phone shopping right before Christmas, but chickened out at the AT&T store in Hixson when it became apparent that the cellphone company was pushing deals with so many moving parts they were impossible for a dummy like me to understand.
That sensible little brunette on the AT&T television commercials touting the company's Mobile Share plans wants us to believe that things are easy-peasy. To that, I say, not so fast, perky little Eastern-European-looking woman.
What they don't tell you is that all you think you know about phone contracts has flipped. Instead of purchasing talk minutes, you now are encouraged to buy big buckets of data -- think family-sized tubs of popcorn at the Majestic. And rather than fold the cost of a new phone into the contract -- like in olden days back in the 2000s -- incentives have been put in place to entice you to finance your expensive new smartphone with handy, zero-interest loans.
I find it all very confusing.
But confusion gets shoved aside when you have a clarifying event. In this case, one night last week my wife's phone broke -- really broke. The screen went blank and refused to reboot except for a ghostly Apple image -- which I interpreted as some sort of digital epitaph referencing original sin.
My wife panicked. Even after I promised to go phone shopping the next day, she remained nervous about not being able to text her friends for 24 hours. I may or may not have used a word that starts with "puh" and ends with "thetic" to describe her angst which, in retrospect, was not a smart thing to do. My wife shoots shotguns for recreation, and I was suddenly reminding her more and more of a clay target.
Anyway, my wife borrowed a friend's old, cracked iPhone for 24 hours until we could make it to the AT&T store, where the clerk was able to diagnose our problem and size things up in 3 seconds.
"So, looks you've got one broken iPhone and one borrowed iPhone that's a little less broken," he summarized. (I think he's the brother of the girl on TV.)
Since Christmas, I had done my homework and was able to quote chapter and verse on the data plan I wanted. Both my wife and I got new iPhones. I got then new iPhone 6 Plus, which is about the size of Kansas and feels like a 12-pack of AA batteries in my pocket. My wife got a new iPhone 6 in a nice red case.
Meanwhile, my 13-year-old son inherited my old iPhone, which put him in a state of euphoria that caused him, for the first time in his life, to do a burst of household chores out of sheer gratitude. I've decided to call some theologians to see if this technically qualifies as a miracle.
Meanwhile, if I turn up dead from a shotgun wound, don't rule out my better half.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.