Cellphone plans: Beancounter Beartraps. Bread & Circuses that fit in your pocket

Isn't it bad enough that cellphones give people cranial cancer? Apparently not.

Even if you're armed with an abacus, Pentium computer, a slide ruler, and a pack of Tarot cards, cellphone plans still leave you screwed, stewed, and double-tatooed. There must be a kind of Beancounter Bohemian Grove where beancounters worship idols constructed out of beans, where they walk along mosaic paths made of multi-colored beans, where they are served franks and beans, and get stoned on bean wine, before wrapping their neckties around their heads and engaging in pocket protector orgies.

Cellphones are like automobile traffic, offering one of the few opportunities for us to see just what others are made of. There's nothing more depressing than continually witnessing the existential loneliness of the human race, with these phones going off in washrooms, restaurants, movie theaters, in movies -- everywhere. I've yet to be in the presence of a brain surgeon answering an urgent cellphone call. My brother is a doctor and he doesn't own a cellphone. I've yet to be around anyone answering a call as modestly important as what to feed one's goldfish. No, cellphones are yet another gadget for the perpetually distracted, for the endlessly fidgeting masses, for poseurs of every persuasion.

Cellphone plans are like quicksand: the more you struggle, the quicker you sink. I'm sure there are people who believe they have found the plan that has them dialing with glee, believing they have beaten the Devil. When one believes such folly, you can be sure their figurative pants have been pulled down around their figurative ankles, their elbows are propped atop a barrell, and baby oil is being liberally applied to their hind quarters. The fools. In the meantime, they are free to disturb and harass those few of us left who don't require digital handjobs every quarter hour just to get through our miserable days.

And how the beancounters must be chuckling with asthmatic celebratory teeth-sucking joy over the myriad ways in which they slowly, penny-by-penny, enslave our populous. In ten years I predict there will be a Nobel Prize for Small Print honoring these sallow, vengeful, basement-dwelling vermin who associate algebra with eroticism.

"So what are you wearing?" is the most intelligent thing I've ever heard wheezed into one of these goddamned gadgets.

After being privy to more cellphone conversations than I would like to admit to, I think I now understand why there is so little concern, so little press, so little outcry about the cranial cancer they cause.