It all happened so fast. One minute I was sitting at my work station, pondering the mysteries of life and journalism. The next I had shot out the door, hell-bent on resolving my total lack of personal phone service once and for all.

A mere hour later, I had sold my soul to the devil.

Ok, so possibly it wasn't a great, grinning demon offering me a flaming quill and hissing promises of unimaginable wealth, but rather an authorized dealer - a mere mortal, in fact - whose cell phone contract I signed that day.

Yep, I've finally tossed my hat into the cell phone, ahem, "ring."

For most of you, that was a statement utterly devoid of all meaning, except for the slight scoff or headshake elicited by the idiotic pun. A 22-year-old dude gets a cell phone, big whoop.

In reality, this is one of several unmistakable signs denoting a fundamental shift in one of the planes of existence that binds the fabric of our universe together. Or - as some of my less verbose friends have put it - it means hell froze over Monday morning after breakfast.

You see for years, I've been denouncing those who use cell phones as fools and heretics. Heretics only because it's a cool word which I never have actual justification for using and fools for all the typical reasons: cell phones rot your brains, their use is often conducted rudely and most cell phone conversations are exercises in triviality that the world could do without.

This last fact is especially true in college, where students make only two kinds of calls: awareness alerts and drunk dials.

Awareness alerts are the pointless conversations I saw 85 percent of my classmates engage in immediately after getting out of class. Every single one of them went exactly like this:

Caller: Hey, what's up?

Responder: Nothing, what's up with you?

Caller: Not much, just got out of class. Now I'm walking back to the dorm.

Responder: Oh cool, cool. So, what's up?

Caller: Oh I dunno, I'm probably going to (insert common banality here) and then go tanning. How 'bout you?

This repeats indefinitely until the caller gets back to their dorm, upon which the call ends because the two brilliant conversationalists are now physically in the same room.

At which point I'm glad to say I don't know what happens, because whenever possible I avoided befriending or living with mindless automatons.

The second kind of call is the drunk dial. These are the embarrassing calls inebriated college kids make after 1 or 2 a.m. to friends, former flames and pizza places.

Except for the calls to Dominoes, these messages are completely devoid of substance and generally "forgotten" by the next morning. Kind of like sober dials now that I think about it.

It was inevitable, of course, although I like to think I valiantly fought the good fight against society's mind-numbing insistence that cell phones are necessary for life in the modern world for a little while, at least.

After years of repeatedly refusing to use the stupid things, a sudden and swift surrender is probably the best I could hope for.

And best of all, it looks like I get to keep my soul. That is, assuming I haven't already sold it on Ebay.