When I was a child in Catholic school, Easter was taught to be a time of renewal, a time of resurrection; the light survives to fight the dark another day and hope is breathed back into the lungs of life.

However, with all due respect to both the holiday and my personal fate, what I really need to be blessed with the miracle of resurrection is my mobile phone.

I’m not sure how long it’s suffered. It’s only three years old and was never mishandled, mistreated, or abused, though it seems to have left this mortal world in quite a hurry, refusing to take a charge and throwing the entire process of my life up in the air.

‘Planned obsolescence’ is a cool sounding phrase the kids throw around, and my friends, that is how I feel about modern cell phones and their lifespans. Whether I paid forty dollars or four-hundred dollars on the device, and even if I treat it with delicate care like a priceless Faberge egg; it will inevitably fail sooner rather than later.

I mean I get it, this is how it goes now, hardly any of us venture to a ‘repair shop’ anymore unless it’s just to have a broken screen repaired. This is usually because we prefer the fastest and most convenient option of removing and replacing the broken device, and we tend to do it over, and over again.

I remember the early eighties VHS players. They were heavy and bulky, constructed of metal and thick plastic, and usually if something inside it broke I could get in there and fix it with a few pointers from the video rental store manager or being mechanically inclined. This is certainly not the way of today’s DVD and Blu-ray players which feel so light and flimsy out of the box I might as well have a frisbee match with them.

That doesn’t mean I want my mobile phone to be ten-thousand pounds in weight, or for it to have rust damage if there is a light sprinkle of rain, nor do I want to sound like a man steadily on his way to old age and befuddling children while talking about how landline phones were built to last. Good old ‘Ma Bell’ must be rolling in her grave.

It would be bad enough if it was just a phone but it’s everything today, from a Lyft dispatcher to a camera to a way to make appointments online…this is why they don’t care if the phone does not last long no matter how well you care for it, you WILL buy another one, you don’t just want one but you NEED one; a mobile phone is almost a prerequisite for modern life.

Which is fine, I’m all for a all in one handy dandy tool that is everything from an atlas to a flashlight, but can’t we get value for money spent over time or some loyalty for years of staying with our cell phone service provider?

So I’ll have to scrape a scratched barrel to replace it. I should get some more help from the Judas’ at my cell phone provider, but they know not what they do to their customer base.