YOU GUYS. My cell phone is missing and it's crippling. Kinda like the TWENTY TO THIRTY INCHES OF SNOW that has just begun to fall on the DC area. When snow is measured in feet instead of inches, all bets are off. And they've been talking about it since Monday and STILL people are fighting over the last shovel at Home Depot. Seriously, people; you were warned. You had time. You want a shovel? I'll sell you one of ours for $50. Text me.
OH WAIT! You can't text me because I can't find my damn cell phone.
Maybe you've seen it. It looks like this:
...and yes, I know that all the Cool Kids have touch-screen phones instead of real QWERTY keys, but I like my li'l keyboard. And I like the music and photos I have on my itty-bitty two-gig memory chip that would blow away if I sneezed on it.
Here's the worst thing. I am pretty sure it's in my house. I got back from the grocery store last Saturday and never left the house until I went to church on Sunday, and on the way out the door then I remember thinking, Huh, don't have my cell phone but oh well, God'll know how to reach me there.
I keep looking and looking and looking again, mostly in the same places, as if I expect it to miraculously be there even though it wasn't the first three five eleven times I looked. I tried calling it, but the battery has long since drained. Plus, it was on vibrate anyway.
My Facebook friends offered some helpful suggestions. "Look in your coat pockets," someone offered. Well, thanks Sherlock, I could do that again, I suppose, even though it was the FIRST place I looked. Another said when she lost hers, she discovered it under the fridge (and no, I don't know how that happens either), and yet another said it was wedged under her kid's car seat, which I could see. In fact, I would look there if my car seat-sized kid had been with me at the grocery store, but he wasn't, and I remember getting a text after I got home anyway.
Luckily, I have a work-issued Blackberry, so I'm not completely disconnected. Company policy does prohibit use of the "SMS" feature, so texting's out... but I can get email, and voice calls. Also, if you leave me a voice message on my lost cell, I have it set to email me a transcript of the message (thanks, Google Voice!). The only thing is, the Blackberry's on T-Mobile and my personal cell's on Verizon, which is a much better network locally.
Wow, did you read that? How complicated is all of that tech-stuff anyway? When I was a kid, "call me" meant walk over to the wall where your one and only house phone is mounted, stick your finger in the rotary dial and literally DIAL my number, which you either will have memorized or written down on a note by the phone or you'll have to look it up in the phone book, or just dial "0" and ask the "operator" to connect you, because there was no such thing as "speed dial"... and then when the call went through, I would run to my kitchen wall and answer the literally RINGING phone (not vibrating - ringing, like a bell!) that looked like this (thanks to this blog for the photo):
...and I would stand there, tethered to the wall by a few feet of curly cord, and talk within earshot of my mother. Phones were for talking. They were not for "texting" or faxing or photographing or listening to music. But the best thing about the phone on the wall was that you could not LOSE it because it was HUGE and YELLOW and STUCK TO THE WALL with wires and screws and there was ONLY ONE and we SHARED IT and THAT'S ALL WE KNEW so WE LIKED IT.
Anyone who was born after 1985 is reading this and going... wall?... dial?.... share?... operator?... what kind of book??
I know. Shut up. I was born in the 1960s. It was a simpler time. Phones could not be misplaced, and "text" was still a noun. Someone needs to document all of this ancient history so that our descendants can know how difficult different it was in prehistoric times the 1980s.
Anyway. For better or worse, I've become accustomed to being connected, accessible, within reach. That's what most of us do now. It is our new reality. And yes, if you're good at math, you've figured out that I carry around two cell phones with me and now I "only" have one. I know. It's crazy.
I should have plenty of time to look in my coat pockets AGAIN this weekend during the epic, crippling, paralyzing, disruptive blizzard, whose first flakes continue to fall. And I truly don't even care if I find my phone in some ridiculous place, like in my shower stall or between the washer and dryer or under the stack of clothes that's been sitting on the ironing board for a couple of years months. Because if I find it there, that means my cell and I have been reunited. And that will feel soooo good.
