17 Reasons You Secretly Miss Your Old Flip Phone

1. You miss having an excuse to not respond to texts. Seriously, 10 years ago it was so easy to say, “my screen froze” or “my battery died and no one had a sprint charger.” And those excuses always sounded reasonable. But now? It’s 2015, everyone knows you got the text and just didn’t answer. It’s stressful.

2. You really want your Britney Spears ringtone back. How are we ever going to be able to hear who’s calling without those ringtones? We all keep our phones on vibrate now and miss calls because we didn’t feel them. When “Toxic” is blaring from your phone, you’re going to answer.

3. You’d love it if your boss couldn’t reach you via email at ANY HOUR OF THE DAY. Or send you passive aggressive texts that you, once again, can’t ignore.

4. You miss sassily snapping your phone open or closed. Without that feature, how else are you going to look like Lindsay Lohan in the Disney Channel original movie, “Get A Clue.”

5. You miss playing Snake, Tetris and all those other old-school games. With the flip phone you really had to work at them – dig your fingernails into the keyboard to move your shapes into the right place. There was glory. There was a challenge and when you conquered those games, you felt a very legitimate sense of accomplishment.

6. You crave the feeling of physically hanging up on someone. When someone’s being incredibly frustrating on the phone, you really want to slam the phone closed. There is no therapeutic alleviation in pressing the circular red button to end a call. When you’ve been on the phone with the bank, or after your parents have kicked you off the family health plan, you’d really appreciate the opportunity to slam the phone closed.

7. You yearn for the days when cell phones were so new that no one could remember their number, and everyone had to put a label on their phone spelling out their phone number. It’s truly a shame that we’re never going to hear the phrase, “I forgot my cell phone number,” ever again.

8. You would like, just once, to be able to get drunk and drop your phone and not have to worry about it breaking. Is it possible that the era of the smart phone has encouraged us to drink less? Okay, no, but you see my point.

9. Now that your siblings and you have moved far away from each other, you miss fighting with them over who gets to use the flip phone this week. And while we’re on this topic, you also miss the “oh, sorry, I don’t have the phone this week, so I couldn’t call you back” excuse.

10. You secretly wish you didn’t have Instagram. It used to be a novelty that you could take a picture on your phone at all, and now we’re judged on the clarity and artistry of the picture. Can’t you just be impressed by the fact that in this photograph you came out as a beautiful, hazy blur? Please?

11. You liked when texts actually looked like texts. When commercials for cell phones came on television, you used to be able to identify the text message on a flip phone by the 14-point, block font. Now everything just looks like a computer, and to be honest, you’re over starting at a computer all day.

12. You were once the hero for pulling out your phone and using the beam of light as a flashlight. Now people get mad at you if you don’t pull your flashlight app out soon enough. You just want to be the hero again, is that so much to ask?

13. You’re sick of people requiring you to respond immediately. You really don’t love that the person on the other end of your text can see you typing, and re-typing and trying to craft the perfect response. People used to understand that it took a while to text back because it was a physically slow process. Pressing each key three times is fairly time consuming.

14. There used to be much more fanfare when you received a text – if for no other reason than Samsung provided an option to play “fanfare” whenever you had a new notification.

15. The big bold: “one new text message” appeared on the screen and there was a moment of wonderment in which you thought this text could be the text of your dreams. Now, you just see the text appear on your smart phone screen.

16. You secretly want a flip phone back because you think it would make the perfect ironic accessory. A few celebrities rock flip phones and they look awesome.

17. You assume that getting a flip phone again would be a great reminder to the younger generation of what your middle school experience was like. No, Bobby Smith did not like your photos on Instagram. Instead, your phone froze right in the middle of you sending a text asking him to the Sadie Hawkins dance and you lived in turmoil, wondering if the text ever even sent to him.

18. You actually used to come home, sign on to your computer and have notifications when you opened Facebook. With a smart phone, you compulsively check your notifications every time the red number appears in the top right corner of your Facebook icon. Once again, that sense of wonder has evaporated.