There must be something wrong with me.

I have this love/hate relationship with a piece of electronic equipment. I hate the thing, but I cannot live without it.

You know what I’m talking about. It’s the cellphone that goes with me everywhere.

I need to stipulate that I have one of those “ancient” flip-top phones. No smartie-pants phone for me, at least not yet. My little gadget does what I need it to do: It makes phone calls; it receives them; it tells me when I miss a call; it gives me the phone number to call back – if I want to talk that person; it does receive text messages (and if I felt like learning how to send one of those messages back, I would, but I so far have resisted the temptation).

When I take my cellphone out of my pocket, I receive strange looks from my younger friends and colleagues, and from family members who’ve “updated” their status to the smart phones, I-phones, the things that can tuck you in at night – after singing a lullaby. One friend looked at my Samsung and said, “Hey, that looks like my first cell phone.” Then he laughed out loud, with the slightest hint of derision.

Having declared my love/hate relationship with this phone, I want to add one critical caveat. I will not, as one of my former colleagues once admitted, go back home to fetch it if I manage to leave it behind. My ex-colleague even admitted to me that he would leave his driver’s license at home – but not his cellphone. “So,” I asked my friend, Brad, “you would rather break the law by driving without your driver’s license in your possession than go through your day without your cellphone. Is that right?” Brad said he would.

I won’t go there, I told him. And do not even get me started by mentioning those who drive their motor vehicles while blabbing on one of those devices.

But I do find the phone increasingly indispensable to my daily routine – even though I hate it.