Relative Something

It took quite a few years, but I have finally joined the fraternity of individuals who have destroyed their cell phones in water. The relic, which was almost retro in its dated flip-phone design, is dead as can be.

I went through the routine of common methods used to recover a wet phone, but it was too far gone.

In my frantic multitasking to prepare for our first open house on Saturday, I tossed multiple things into the clothes basket for the trip downstairs from our bedroom. On the main floor, I took out everything I could see that wasn’t dirty clothes. Eventually, I came back around to hurriedly dump the basket into the washer. The phone wasn’t discovered until the final spin-dry cycle had ended. I was transferring clothes to the dryer, when the machine started to make a strange sound. I tried to deduce what could be going wrong with the washer, but, finding nothing, went back to pulling out clothes.

That effort soon revealed the source of the odd noise to be one flip-phone, stuck in permanent vibrate mode.

Of course, there is never a good time to soak your cell phone, but I just provided my cell number as contact method for people working on our house, as well as realtors who will be scheduling showings. This is a really bad time for me to not have my phone.

Fortunately, it is a real good time to upgrade my cell phone and take advantage of more current technology. I went out yesterday and purchased an iPhone as replacement. So, I now have a new phone, but I was unable to carry over my contact list, so if you are someone who may have reason to expect a call from me, you need to send me your number.

I will do my best to recreate my contacts, but I didn’t even know my own children’s numbers, having consistently relied on auto-dialing to reach them from my phone’s memory. I keep making gestures to reach for my old phone to look up numbers I am trying to remember, which is an interesting demonstration of habit over consciousness.

I’m hoping to get a tutoring session real soon, expecting there should be a simple step to save incoming calls to the contacts. I haven’t found how to do that on my own yet, as I am busy trying to determine simple things like, turning it on or off, and getting it to ring when I want and be silent when I need.

There is nothing like the acquisition of a new electronic device to demonstrate how far you lag behind the curve of common technical knowledge. It reminds me a bit of the feeling of growing old.