I’m headed to London tonight (and yes, I’m hard). On my two previous jaunts to Europe in November (London) and February (Amsterdam), AT&T was my cell phone carrier, so all I had to do was give them a heads up and boom – I could bring my iPhone to Europe, no problem.

While that part of AT&T was terrific, every single other part was terrible. So in March or April, I switched to Verizon. I don’t want to sound too dramatic here, but it was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. After years of AT&T and Sprint before that, I had forgotten what it’s like to have a cell phone that you can depend on and, you know, make calls with. So no complaints there.

But one thing Verizon does not have is an easy way to use your phone internationally. I was told by other Verizon customers that this was a pain: that they send you a replacement phone which you have to send back and blah blah blah. Being lazy, this turned me off immediately. But on the most recent trip to Amsterdam, which was a 12-man bachelor party, those with phones were kings, and those without phones were left in the dark, sometimes forced to hang around the spots we frequented, waiting for the rest of the group to show up, as there was no way to get in touch with the others. (But hey, at least there were whores and pot to occupy your time if you lost the rest of the group.)

So even though I’m in London this weekend for only 73 hours, I knew I wanted a phone. And to my surprise (and delight), getting the loaner from Verizon was really, really easy – the shipped it, it arrived overnight, and I activated it. When I’m done, I’ll reactivate my old phone and ship the loaner back in the same box it arrived in. (And the loaner phone is my regular NYC number!) Bless you, Verizon.

But the catch – and it’s not really a catch, per se – is that my loaner phone is not only purple (which I can deal with), but it’s a flip-type phone. And it is not only a flip-type phone, it is an old flip-type phone. While the above photo is not my actual phone, it’s close to it, sans the purple.

I tested the phone by sending two text messages, one to my lady and one to a buddy in England. The former consisted of only “testing,” while the second was “Simon, it’s Jason. Testing the new phone.” But because I haven’t had a flip phone since 2005 (I had a Treo before an iPhone), the first text message took about two minutes to type, while the second took about as long as a quarter of football and because I couldn’t find puncutation, read “simon its jason testing the new phone.”

To be sure, by the end of this trip, I’m sure my old dexterity will come back and hitting the number 7 four times for an “s” will seem as normal as updating my Facebook status from my iPhone while in the shower. But until then, I feel like my dad using a cell phone – totally and completely befuddled by this strange, new (but old) technology.