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“I Have to Stand in a Certain Spot in My Kitchen or It Cuts Out…”

So I’ve got this piece of shit of a cell phone that I bought a few years ago to replace my previous piece of shit of a cell phone. The old phone, after about two months, stopped holding a charge. The battery was fucked or something. It’d last me maybe six hours, so I’d have to keep it off almost all the time because I like to think I only carry my cell phone for vital emergency purposes. But I kept missing important phone calls. This is back when I used to get important phone calls.

So I got a new phone and had an awkward and semi-hilarious run-in with a guy I hadn’t really spoken to since junior high, but that’s another story. This new phone worked pretty well for awhile. It had better reception indoors, the capability of playing MP3s as ringtones (allowing me to realize my dream of having Europe’s “The Final Countdown” as a ringtone), good volume, and it was a flip-phone which meant I wasn’t scratching up the screen all the time by shoving it into a pocket full of keys, loose change, pens, etc.

It had one weird problem, though: once in a great while, I’d pick it up to check my missed calls and find, instead of “2 missed calls” or “1 new message” or whatever, there’d just be a timestamp. An old, old timestamp. Like, say, I’d get out of class at 5:30, and I’d check my phone for the first time since entering class at 1:30, and it’d say, “2:47.” It was frozen. I’d flip open the phone, but the screen wouldn’t illuminate. It couldn’t be turned off; I could only pop the battery out and then back in. Seemed like an easy enough solution to a fairly pointless problem that, really, wouldn’t happen any more than once every two or three months.

But it’s started getting more frequent, which has led me to this semi-pointless rant. Because, honestly, aside from potential jobs calling, I’ve had no use for my phone over the past several months. I usually don’t even have it with me, or if I do I have it off, or if I leave it on it’s sitting in my car or on my desk, and I’m shocked, baffled, and on occasion horrified when “The Final Countdown” blares. I have an instinctive reaction like, “I hate you, you damn phone, for being tethered to me and not allowing me to be free of communication with everybody I know.” Because, the fact of the matter is, I dislike most of the people I know. Fortunately, very few of them ever call me.

I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense to resent the cell phone even though I do, indeed, usually keep it at least somewhere near me. Somewhere that I’ll hear its desperate blooping that I’ve missed a call within a short while, so if it is a job — and let’s face it, at this point I’d have a better chance of being called by the Queen of England than getting a job callback — I can get back to them in fewer than six weeks. Because, yes, I do feel I need it for incoming important calls and outgoing emergency calls; I just resent the incoming calls that aren’t important. Not to split hairs or anything…

So Saturday, while I was nowhere to be found, I got a call from Lucy. She asked me to call her back; I didn’t. She called me yesterday and left me a message chiding me for not returning her call, but she was in a suspiciously gleeful mood because of some stupid promotion at Lowe’s that she’s all excited about. She told me she’d find out for sure if she got the promotion tomorrow, meaning today, and hopefully I’d actually answer when she called. I called her back and left a sarcastic message about how, for a change, I might actually keep my phone with me so that I can pick up when she calls…

Around seven this evening, when I realized she hadn’t called, I — for the first time today — looked down at my phone: “2:17 p.m.,” it read. And of course, when I popped the battery out and back in and turned the phone back on, I had a message waiting. Motherfucker.

Posted by Stan on June 6, 2006 9:24 PM  | Permalink | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em | Digg It