Now I’m not saying Cingular is necessarily bad in New York. If you look at the coverage maps for any carrier, you’ll see Manhattan as one big block of max signal strength. I think it’s these damn high-rises and prewar buildings everywhere that severely degrade indoor reception.

So after being annoyed w/Cingular for about a month for my lack of even semi-constant reception, I decided it was time to take action and make a switch. Now given my reason for changing carriers, you’d think that I would seek out and subscribe to the carrier with the best service in New York.

Well… I thought about it, but the best/only good carrier is Verizon. Unfortunately, they also have the worst phones… So instead I decided to go by my usual criteria… (the reason I switched from Verizon to Cingular three years ago even though Verizon was still better back then – and the reason I decided to go with T-Mobile)… A COOL ASS PHONE.

So check it… the Blackberry “Pearl” (8100). I can’t say it’s “The Perfect Phone”… but it’s by far the closest thing I’ve seen to it. You can configure everything from fonts, to the menu layout, to even reassigning any key to be whatever you want it to be. Combine that with an unlimited data plan and push email and I sometimes wonder if I really care about whether or not it can make phone calls…

Unfortunately, that’s the one thing it can’t do well. Don’t get me wrong… again no complaints about the phone itself whatsoever… But if talking on Cingular felt like being a kid trying to play telephone with tin cans and string; T-Mobile leaves me feeling like a retarded kid trying to have a conversation with the radio.

I’ll admit, at first I was irate about this even more inferior service and ready to smash my phone up some T-Mobile rep’s nostrils. Then I discovered how ‘useful’ an unlimited data plan can be. Now, I’m instead learning to adapt my phone usage habits to cater to the limitations of the service [read: addicted to crackberry].

So if you find that I don’t call you, pickup, or return your phone calls… it’s for one of two reasons:

1. I don’t have reception.
2. I have reception but it’s so spotty that I don’t wanna deal with trying to have an unintelligible conversation.

Now if you email/IM/text message me on the other hand… I’ll be all over that shit.

Fast forward a few years to college. All my friends had electric razors. In my naivety about the fact that I have far more facial hair than my yellow brothers, I decided to give it a try. My first shave with one was painful to put it mildly. Instead of ‘cutting’ the hairs it felt more like it was pulling them out. To make things worse, the shave left me with a 5 o’clock shadow. Disappointed, I gave the razor away and went back to my trusty old Gillette.

Fast forward again to my move to NYC. Somehow I manage to lose my Gillette. (Don’t worry I’m not too sentimental about that razor… well I might have shed a few tears). So I was left shaving with a disposable travel razor that I’ve had for about two or three years now. Yes I know, ‘disposable’ <> 3 years… but hey, I’m lazy and disposing entails going out and purchasing.

So let me tell you… shaving with a razor with dull blades feels like scraping a jagged rock against your face. And to top it off, you end up cutting yourself more because you’re fighting to get the razor down your cheek.

After a few weeks of this mortification of the flesh, I found myself in CVS standing before a plethora of razors. There were razors with 3, 4 or 5 blades, razors with/without gel strips, and even conventional razors that need batteries.

[The odd thing is that unlike electronics, old models don't seem to get retired. It's like going to a computer store and seeing a dot matrix printer for sale next to the color laser/fax/scanner/copier combo printer. The even stranger thing is that the price of the old products haven't gone down. The newer ones are just more expensive.]

Being the technology whore that I am… I of course had to get the one with 5 blades, gel strip, back blade (for those hard to reach spots), and yes… power. I figured that considering I’ve had my last razor for about 15 years, I should probably as get up to date as possible for the next 15.

So back to this power thing… I must admit that I had a bit of trepidation about buying a device that would send ‘electric pulses’ to my face. The theory behind it is that it makes the hair follicles stand up so that you get a closer shave.

So I get home with my shiny new Gillette Fusion Power and I get ready for my first shave. I first try w/out the power just to test it out as a razor. Not bad… 5 blades is definitely better than 3. The gel strip is kinda cool too. The only thing is that the razor pivots more than my old one and as a result it’s kinda hard to put pressure on the edge. That’s okay though, that’s what the back blade is for. So now on to the power.

I press the button and the whole thing just starts to vibrate. I stand there looking at this thing wondering what the hell electronic pulses have to do with vibration. Just to make sure I wasn’t going to electrocute my face I touched the blade with my finger to see what these so called pulses felt like… zilch. No tingling, no pulsing, just vibration. So after all this, I finally start shaving with the thing. It felt like I had an electric razor on my face; I couldn’t feel the blades at all. After the initial ‘hmm… do I like this vibrating razor?’ and shaving patch after patch of my face turning the razor on and off; I decided to leave it on. The end result… easily the closest shave I’ve ever had.

Now I don’t know if it’s the fact that the blades are new, or that there’s 5 of them, or if there really is something to this whole powered razor thing… but I must say I’m loving this new razor. I still try not to shave more than once a week if I can help it, but at least now I’m not walking around the house with little pieces of toilet paper stuck to my face afterwards.