About a week ago, my dad sent me a referral email letting me know that he had gotten a smart phone and was using Mint Mobile, the discount mobile phone provider. Thank god, I thought to myself when I saw the message. I had been telling him for the last THREE years to get rid of his dumb phone, which was tied to AT&T, who wasted no time in charging them exorbitant rates *just* for talk — no internet, no texting, no nada. He was actually paying more for his talk minutes with AT&T than I was paying for my share of unlimited talk, text, and internet on T-Mobile. Apparently, that wasn’t enough to get him to switch three years ago. So I wasn’t sure what finally got him moving on this at this time; AT&T must have tried to lock them into another stupid contract that finally caused him to move on. My dad, or well, my parents are extremely change averse. If you want a sense of how change averse they are, my dad still uses a TYPEWRITER to type letters he needs to do for his apartment management work. This is despite the fact that he has multiple computers AND printers at home.

Then, this evening, I was a little surprised to get a text notification from “Mom and Dad” on my phone. The message said:

“Hi Yvonne, Thanks to you and Chris for the specialty coffee. We will look forward to drinking this… How is the pregnancy going?”

I immediately started laughing when I read the text — it was my dad’s VERY FIRST TEXT MESSAGE. I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited by this that I actually took a screen shot of the text.

I proceeded to ask him via text which phone he got, and then he told me. He also let me know that my mom would also be getting her new smart phone soon, a different model than his, and they’d share the number after it’s set up. Amazing, I thought to myself. They could finally both leave the house separately and be accessible with their own numbers.

It took long enough, but they are finally in the 21st century.