Most members of my family and even some of my friends know that I have a love-hate relationship with cell phones.

It’s mostly a hate relationship, I must confess, particularly when I hear people flapping their yaps on them in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear them talking about nothing of importance.

However …

I have discovered that cell phones have at least one redeeming quality. I discovered it today on the road back from Allen, where my wife and I had just helped our granddaughter Emma — perhaps you’ve heard me mention her on occasion — celebrate her first birthday.

We were driving home on U.S. 287, blazing through Quanah when a warning message flashed on the dashboard of our 2010 Toyota Prius. It said, “Oil Maintenance Required.”

My wife was at the wheel. Given that we’ve owned the vehicle only a few months and we haven’t acquainted ourselves fully with all the bells and whistles that it contains, we were uncertain about what we were supposed to do. Do we keep going? Do we stop and check the oil level?

We decided to stop in Childress, but before we did my wife said, “Why don’t you call the Toyota dealership and ask them what it means?” Why not, indeed? I work part-time at the dealership where we bought the car; I know the phone number.

We pulled into the parking lot, popped the hood on the car and I called the service department using my handy-dandy cell phone. “Hey, what do I do when the message flashes that tells me ‘oil maintenance’ must be done on the car?” I asked the service technician who answered the phone.

“It just means you’re due for an oil change or a tire rotation,” he told me, assuring me the car wasn’t going to croak in, say, Estelline, Memphis or Hedley on the way home.

There you have it, the perfect reason to own a cell phone.

You won’t catch me blabbing about nonsense in a crowded restaurant. I like using the device when I need to talk to a family member about an urgent matter — or when I need an answer about the vehicle that’s carrying my wife and me home.

I got it. I’m grateful for it.

I still don’t like the thing.