The title slug above is the tagline for Virgin Mobile USA. I don't usually enthuse about companies' marketing campaigns -- there being so few opportunities to get excited about their mostly dullard, braindamaged efforts along such lines -- but this one is absolutely brilliant. As I hugely over-explained yesterday, I'm suddenly cut off from the world of mainstream telecommunications. This has shifted me, interestingly, into the demographic normally reserved for teens, who -- fortunately for them -- are in no position to commit to two-year cell phone service contracts. Gee. What's a boy or girl to do?

Once in a blue moon, companies wake up and pay attention to such dynamics -- once it becomes clear they represent enormous untapped market potential. I went to Target yesterday and asked if there weren't some sort of cell phone I could buy and feed it minutes via a pre-paid card. Obviously, I'd heard tell of such things, mostly via my 15-year-old daughter, but had never had to resort to such an approach as I could so easily sign up for Cingular (nee AT&T) cell service and run up a $1700 bill, which they're now suing me to recover. (Good luck!)

The salesman's answer, although he didn't put it this way, might as well have been: "DUH!" But instead of saying anything, he led me to a 15-foot wide store display where five companies were offering a dozen phones and all sorts of programs that required nothing more than the bucks to buy them on the spot and, in the Virgin Mobile case, a service activation process that takes no more than five minutes. And bam, I'm back online. At least with respect to phone. I'm still dependent on Starbucks and T-Mobile to post here, but even though it's a little pricey, that's filling the bill just fine as well. And the price difference for both these temporary solutions -- phone and Internet -- are trivial in the short haul. Works for me.

Although my situation is the result of gross negligence on my part, it's provided an opportunity to see how the other half lives, so to speak. The "other half" in this case being mostly kids, who depend on cell phones and net connections for indispensable social glue at this juncture of our fast-evolving, ever so confusing history-in-the-making. Are there kids -- and grownups -- who fall through the cracks, who can't afford these alternatives to conventional communications services? Yeah, there are. I have no ultimate solution to the ubiquitous have-nots problem -- aside from smashing the Capitalist State. But, somehow, I'm not holding my breath on that score. Red states, blue states... we're a long way from The Revolution, Virginia. Plus, it puts the fear of God in me like nothing else does to imagine a republic run by the slashdot rabble. You can sue me for that one, though you'll need to get in line behind Cingular.

All that aside, as it needs to be put, "discovering" these perfectly workable workarounds has been big fun. And surprisingly perhaps (given my above smash-the-state remarks), it makes me proud to be an American. No, I'm not being facetious. Is there a huge amount of money to be made in these "new" products-cum-services? You bet. Are companies late to the party in recognizing and seizing on the opportunity the otherwise disenfranchised teen market represented? Yeah again. Though they weren't as late as I was in grasping what was going on. I saw this happening some years ago, but I had no idea it had grown as big as that 15 feet of shelf-share at Target made screamingly clear to me yesterday. But the point of all this to me, and the reason I'm writing about it here, is that these changes were driven bottom up by kids who wanted it "their way" -- and are now rewarding companies who finally saw that with what I can only imagine are windfall profits.

Cell phone service has been a nightmare of needlessly complicated options and draconian "legal" provisions that has made choosing a phone and a matching provider a thicket of conflicting choices requiring the kind of complex multivariate analysis that only die-hard road warriors have been known to take perverse delight in. "Live without a plan" is brilliant not just because it describes Virgin Mobile's waiving of one- and two-year service commitments, but at a deeper (and dare I say more profound) level, it captures the Zeitgeist of our children, who don't give the proverbial fig for the future.

While I guess some culture critics could write weighty jeremiads on how scary that is, I see it as cause for celebration. Let's face it: the future we've offered our kids sucks bigtime. If they bypass it, work around it, leave it on the garbage dump of history that might have been, my hat is off to them. The alternative make-it-up-as-you-go ad hoc anarchy has got to beat trying to fit your life into patterns and programs invented by the unsound of mind for the infirm of spirit. Kick out the jams. Live without a plan. I'm down wit dat, yo. And as you may have guessed already, always have been.