Rant #2,240: Changes

A few weeks ago, when my family and I were on our cruise, my cellphone did not work at all, and I figured that it was ready for the scrap heap.

I could not power it up, which was not anything new to me, really, as the battery had been wearing down for some time, and the phone constantly had to be charged and recharged.

This was something I was living with for about two years or so, and since it was an old phone, anyway, I figured that when its time would come, it would simply tell me that its time had come, and lo and behold, on the cruise, it spoke volumes to me about its condition.

So when we returned home from the cruise, one of my priorities was to get a new phone--which was put off temporarily when, somehow, I was able to charge up the phone for what I thought was the final time, and I was actually able to use it for about a day.

But then what happened on the cruise happened at home, and the phone died pretty quickly, which forced me into my local Verizon store to purchase a new phone.

I enjoy my new phone--it is certainly newer than what I had, it is slightly bigger, and its is really nice not having to charge up the phone constantly like I had been doing--but the problem was, what do I do with the old phone?

A lot of people turn their old phones into charity, but since the phone didn't work anyway, I figured that it was useless to do so. Plus, it did contain a lot of my data, and even a professionally purged phone still has a minute amount of data that nobody else really needs to have or see.

When I asked the Verizon salesman what to do with the phone, he told me, "Take a hammer to it," but I figured that I would simply put it away as a relic of another time.

But, you see, the phone had other ideas for itself, and I, in turn, had other ideas for the phone.

I had read online that people used their old phone for other uses after purchasing a new phone, including one account I read where somebody still used the phone, but only as an alarm clock.

My son and I watch professional wrestling together, and that means that we watch hours of WWE programming each week.

Much of that programming is on the USA Network, one of the most popular cable networks in the country, but there are some WWE shows that we watch via the WWE Network, a work of genius by the pro wrestling organization that is basically a Netflix of this sport.

One show that we watch on the network is NXT, which is sort of the WWE's minor league, not quite up to Raw or Smackdown standards, but still athletic and entertaining.

We had been watching this show through the phone in a setup in one of our bedrooms, where we connected the phone to an old HDTV that we had that wasn't doing much of anything. This way, we could comfortably sit on a couch in this room and watch the show as if it were an over the air show.

Well, with the phone dead, how were we going to continue to do this?

I did a lot of research, found the proper connection for the new phone, and ordered it online.

But I figured that I would try the old phone one more time.

I connected a charger that I had, rather than plug the phone into a line into a wall socket, and lo and behold, within a couple of minutes, the old phone charged right up.

I then took the old phone into the bedroom, hooked it up to the TV as I had been doing, and Voila!, the phone worked as the delivery device for the WWE Network in that room, so we could watch WWE Network shows on that device as we had been doing for several years now.

What is even better, the device we use has a built-in charger, so as long as the old phone is plugged into it, it is constantly being charged, and thus, able to do what we want it to do 24 hours a day.

There are still some problems.

The phone, in its dying days as a phone, would overheat after about an hour or so of use this way, and my son--who uses this setup a bit more than I do, watching other shows on the WWE Network and on Facebook--has told me that it now extends to about an hour and a half or two hours until it overheats.

In the past, we have put the phone into a glass along with ice cubes in a plastic bag, and that seems to cool it down considerably, so we have employed that tactic again, and it seems to work.

But we know we are living on borrowed time. Eventually, the phone is just going to die, period.

That is the inevitable, but at least we can use it now, until it breathes its last breath.

We have repurposed the phone as a receiver, and right now, even with the glitches, it seems to do the job, so we are going to ride this horse for as long as we can until it finally drops dead.

So if you are in a similar situation, and don't know what to do with your old phone, see what features you can still use and don't get rid of the phone.

It might not work as a phone anymore, but you can remake it to fit whatever need you might have.

The morale of the story: don't kick a good phone until it is down and out.

For once, use modern technology to your advantage.