Ring tones' slippery slope

Is it wrong for me to roll my eyes at other people’s ring tones when my own cell phone plays some sort of Asian jingle? In my defense, it’s just one of the standard ten that’s on the phone. The other one I considered was a jazzy little Hungarian tune, but it was a little too obnoxious.

I’m doing a consulting gig two days a week and I sit in my little cubbyhole minding my own business. When suddenly, out of nowhere, I’m thrust back to the early to mid-1980’s and Hawaii is on my mind. Yep, it’s the theme song from Magnum P.I. You may remember the opening from the show is a shot of a helicopter swooping over the water. Whenever this dude’s phone goes off, I imagine him flying through the office with his trusty theme music at his side.

So I sit and ask myself, “IF I were into ring tones, which one would I want?” And suddenly it becomes clear to me how perfectly normal, sensible people get sucked into the whole ring tone thing. Remember when you first started using a computer and you realized that you could change the desktop background, windows frames, screen savers and the like? Remember how you thought oh I’ll just change this one thing – it’ll only take a second. Then two hours later you emerge blurry eyed and drooling from testing all the options and backgrounds, trying to find just the right one that makes a statement and heaven forbid if you pick the wrong one that doesn’t fit you could be forever branded the loser on the second floor who has a picture of a Cabbage Patch Kid on her screen and ohmygod can you believe she changed her color theme to mauve?!?!?

Okay, what the heck was I talking about? Oh yeah – ring tones. I’m not going down that slippery slope. One minute I’ll be convinced that the theme music from The Walton’s is just right, and the next minute I’ll realize that will be certain social death. Now, the Little House on the Prairie intro… that’s good stuff.