It was about 10 years ago that I called the telephone the devil’s invention. I meant it. The shrill ringing was incessant, always interrupting something pleasant – a conversation, meal preparation, the rhythm of writing, sleep. I loathed the intrusion.

I longed for those two years that I spent incommunicado. It wasn’t a deliberate plan. I’d started a job with about $100 in the bank and a telephone seemed a frivolous expenditure. By the time my bank account had swelled 10 times, it seemed unnecessary.

It was a blissful period. It was easy for me to convince myself that I wasn’t being cheap, but living simply without electronic folderol. I wrote letters, a disappearing art in today’s era of instant communication, to people who lived too far away to visit face to face. I read. I hosted dinner parties. What little television I watched was on a 13-inch black-and-white set with rabbit ears, but the reception was good only if I stood in front of it contorting my body into a pretzel and turned the aluminum foil flags I’d attached to the antenna just so.

Using the telephone was necessary at work, but I owned my life after 5. A quarter would buy a call in a phone booth around the corner from my house, and my father had granted me permission to call collect any time, a sweet deal in the days before cheap long distance. I didn’t miss having a telephone, something those around me failed to understand. It wasn’t as if I was subsisting without modern plumbing or seeking nutrition only from things found in nature, like tree bark.

Life was uncluttered and it was good.

I ordered telephone service under duress, even as I admitted it wasn’t unreasonable for my boss to insist on it. It was his one condition when he decided to promote me in 1984. “You’ll have to get a phone,” he said as sternly as he could, which wasn’t very. I could still wear blue jeans to work if I wanted – a very important concession on his part – but he had to be able to call me whenever he wanted.

It was black with a rotary dial, as most of the phones were. The service was bundled, though no one used that term then. Customers accepted whatever the Baby Bells had to offer, as negotiating the cheapest rate was still years in the future. I still had a TV that barely qualified as a modern convenience, but no longer a throwback to the Paleolithic age, I had joined the modern world.

So how did I end up with this contraption that rarely leaves my side, can take digital pictures and shoot movies, contains the phone number of anyone who was ever important to me, plays a number of soothing (or obnoxious, depending on your viewpoint) melodies and quite possibly could fly me to the moon?

It was a seductive but slippery slope. I hadn’t been plugged in long before I had an answering machine so I wouldn’t miss any calls. I signed up for “call waiting” service as soon as it became available. In 1995, about the time I reached my hypothesis that it was not Alexander Graham Bell, but Satan himself, who was playing around with wires and tinkering with the notion of speech transmission, I had a cell phone. It was one of those big clunky bag phones that were about as convenient to use as a pair of broken vise grips. But I was and am reachable, 24/7, unless I travel too far out of the service area, which is hard to do with a tower every few miles.

It’s an incongruity, but the devil had convinced me I needed it, as I suppose is the case with most addictions.

At least I don’t have a BlackBerry. Yet.