Once upon a time there were phones. These phones plugged into walls and enabled you to correspond with other phone owners. When someone wanted to contact another person with this contraption they dialed a number which in turn, through many technical hijinks, eventually sent a signal to the recipient's phone that caused a little hammer to strike a bell repeatedly, creating a pleasant "ringing" sound.

Well, progress waits for no man, so as soon as phone creators realized they could create this ringing electronically and without moving parts, thus cheaper, the bell and hammer was ditched in favor of a little speaker that created the desired sound. Now that we moved to a speaker, phone makers could experiment with all sorts of sounds, but the majority still opted for the ringing sound or variations of a repetitive electronic "bleat" that was still easily identified as a phone ringing. All was still good in the world.

Then cell phones came along. For a time, people were still locked to what their cell phone vendor wanted you to hear when someone phoned you, but again, progress waits for no man, and soon enough you could choose what you wanted to hear. The things you could choose from were aptly titled "ring tones," as there were tones that sounded like rings, but this too would soon pass.

Somewhere in the early part of the Twenty-First Century, a woman named Missy Elliot would write a song titled "Get Your Freak On," which, I can only assume, sounded just like a phone ringing to some people, because I began to hear it coming out of people's phones in place of the oh-so-familiar ringing sound. The majority of people seemed to still prefer the sound of a phone ringing, but again, this would not stand. As time rolled on more and more people jumped on the "songs instead of rings" bandwagon, the term "ring tone" came to mean nothing, and it has snowballed into our current situation:

There isn't one single actual fucking "ring" sound to choose from on my phone.

My previous phone had the usual plethora of annoying ass songs to choose from, and almost as a tip of the hat by the provider, had one single ring sound appropriately titled "Ring." Well, my company did something to our phone plan which necessitated us getting the newer version of the same phone we had (the Nokia 6010), which in turn had all these snazzy new features, minus the one freaking ring tone I used. Sure, I can pick from classics such as "Just Jazzy," "Tap Dance," "Bee Boogie" or any number scrotum tighteningly bad songs, but there's nary a ring in sight.

What's a boy to do? Well, one option is to go to the now pervasive ring tone purchasing sites on the Internet and simply buy a regular ring tone. What's that? They only sell ring tone versions of current Hip Hop songs and annoying catch phrases? You don't say! How can these sites, which have untold thousands of ring tones not have a single actual ring tone?

Any ideas?