So even though I owned the rather quirky and fun Samsung A300 (the "washing machine" phone) and its successor, the S300, as a schoolgirl, I soon moved on to the Motorola Razr.
Household SES was calculated based on an asset index derived from a listing of household assets (home type, home ownership, electricity in home, television, car, fridge, washing machine, phone).
(machine, phone, electricity, publicity etc).
It could be a soda machine phoning home to report that it needs to be refilled or a connected car interacting with the dealer's computer over a possible malfunction.
Automated teller machines, phone transactions and branch operations were not affected.
Where teen-agers once found work as clerks, telephone operators and messengers, now the fax machines, phone mail systems and computerized data processing are abuzz.
- A cell-phone drying company's CEO, knowing how vital our cellphones are to our lives, loaded up a truck with a generator, two drying machines, phone charging stations, bottled water and a willing employee, and drove all the way from Denver to Houston, where he dried out people's phones for free, a service that ordinarily costs $69.99.
Many observers said they believed that machines — phones in particular — would be less generic, and more tailored for specific functions, like access to social media.
Around me were the sounds of typewriters and copy machines, phones ringing, and young assistants, just a year or two older than Kim, talking by the water cooler.
Over the past 20 years, they have undergone a startling transformation, moving from chaotic and frequently unsanitary events comprising two or three stages and hordes of inebriates making merry in a field of crushed paper cups to expertly policed, conspicuously middle-class affairs awash with cash machines, phone-charging booths and organic food and with all the rebellious spirit of the Proms.
A powerful symbol of this hidden reach of the party is the secure internal network of "red machines," phones that sit on the desks of some 300 of the nation's most elite officials.
