My SO and I can live without them. The only reason we have them is for work. My SO works in IT Support for a law firm, so he was given a Blackberry (he's also on-call every 2 weeks). He hates it, though. It really ties him to work.
My employer got me one because he wanted to be able to get a hold of me when I'm not at the office (and I'm extremely difficult to get a hold of outside of email). He initially planned to get me a phone under his family's Verizon plan, but got me a pay-as-you-go one instead. It's very basic and cheap, which is good as I use it so little I'm racking up rollover minutes like crazy. However, his plan did backfire a bit as the only time I ever really answer is when I'm in Downtown doing hearings, and only if I'm sitting in the waiting room waiting for my hearing to be called. If I'm working at home, he still needs to email me anyway as I usually don't have the cell on me. And if I see that he called me at some point during the day, I just walk over to the office to talk to him (I literally live catacorner to the lot the office is on).
My cell has come in useful for work, for those times I have a question about a property and need his input.
Ironically enough, though I thought it would come in handy for car emergencies, I've not used my cell for that yet. I drive a 15-year-old car, and anything that has come up in the past two years has been minor and something I could fix myself. And despite the fact I was driving Pittsburgh to Gettyburg and back several times a week for two months through the middle of nowhere for a class, those minor problems cropped up when the car was driving locally. Figures.
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