I just upgraded my mobile phone.

First off, I'd like to say that I didn't really want to. I was really happy with my old phone; his name was "Phone." I could use Phone to make calls. I could use him to receive calls. He even had a cool digital clock.

Phone also had a bunch of ultra-modern features. He had a directory of all my friends built in so that whenever I could figure out how to get to the directory, Phone would go ahead and dial people for me. The people that Phone called were usually not the people I had intended to talk to, but over the years I found that I kind of enjoyed that element of surprise.

Phone had built into his back a pretty good camera, which I used from time to time to take pictures of the change in my pocket. Or my thumb. And he had a microscopic keyboard, so that whenever someone sent me a text message like this:

"Hey! How are you?"

... I could just snap open that little keyboard and use my thumbs to nimbly type out a reply:

"lgi uh dfov, to the lajniak!  ;-}"

When my son was in about second grade, he made me a bookmark that features a sort of ransom note version of the words "Happy Fathers Day." The paper is bright orange (his favorite color at the time), and his teacher laminated the finished product in clear plastic to protect it from the beer and coffee stains we fathers can be counted on to get all over our things.

My son, who is now twenty-nine years old and has been out of second grade for a while, might be suprised to learn that I still have that bookmark - although, at the moment it is stuck in one of the stack of books I'm working my way through, and I haven't seen it in a couple of weeks.

There are a few things I have been called in my life that I really enjoy. "Honey" is fun when you get it from a super friendly (and usually equally voluminous) waitress in a Waffle House, and even better from the woman you've been married to for nearly 35 years. "Mate" is nice when spoken by either my friend from Australia or my friend from Cornwall, England. "Coach" is great to be called by a bunch of sincere and smelly little hockey players flopping around an ice rink at 6:30 in the morning.

But the best thing I've ever been called is, "Father." Likewise, "Dad," "Pop," "Daddy," "Papa," and even, under the right circumstances, "Old Man."

Last week I wrote about my less-than-satisfactory experience as a customer of a major airline that shall not be named (it was Delta). What that experience came down to was that the airline (Delta) basically told me that they had my money, and they dared me to try to get anything in return for it.

The amount of feedback I got on this one suggests that I am far from the only traveler who has been cast adrift in what one reader called the "parallel universe of airline logic." For instance, I learned that most airlines will not pay a travel agency any commission for selling a seat on one of their planes, but they will send them a bill if they should make a mistake doing it. 

So after my less-than-satisfactory experience with that one airline (Delta), we booked last month's New York trip on a different unnamed airline (Spirit) - and we discovered a whole new way to think about the words "customer service."

This new airline (Spirit) has adopted a sort of "water torture" method of extracting money from customers, one drip at a time. They sell you really a cheap ticket, then charge fairly stiff fees for everything involved in actually going on your trip; checked luggage, carry-on bags, pre-selected seats. They even charge about three dollars for one of those little bags of nuts.