Connections: Phone Home
Shall I tell you about the day my cellphone had a bath? What happened was that I put a bottle of Honest Tea into my handbag without making sure that the top was screwed on tight. Picking up the bag again hours later, after my yoga class, I found everything inside completely soaked.
Now, I have a love/hate relationship with most technology — you could say I’m a bit technologically challenged, like many of my generation — but I sort of like my cellphone and certainly didn’t mean it any harm. It is an LG Cosmos “messaging phone,” according to the box it came in, which I saved and look at from time to time, as if it might offer up solutions to whatever phone-related confusion I am currently wrangling with. I’ve kept the box and the sales slip since I bought the phone almost five years ago for about $100. Time for an upgrade?
After the tea bath, I asked my husband for help determining if the phone was ever going to work again. We took out the battery, dried everything as best we could — face-down, on the advice of my daughter-in-law — and put it in a big jar of rice. The next day, when the phone still didn’t work, we repeated the whole process. On the second try, it seemed to be coming back to life; it rang when someone called. But the mechanism needed to get from one feature to another (my husband calls it a “four-way controller”) didn’t work. Had something shorted out?
It took me several weeks to face the fact that it was time to do something about a new phone. I was particularly perturbed that the phone numbers I had saved on it were lost because I had stopped saving them to the digital “Rolodex” I’ve crafted on my computer. (If you don’t know what a Rolodex is, ask your parents; you’re too young.)
Once I’d accepted the reality that my old, faithful phone was dead, I started to feel almost excited about getting an up-to-date one. If I got a nice new iPhone, I could take better pictures, and my grandchildren could teach me how to use it and send images to Facebook. That could be fun. I might even get on Instagram and find out what that was all about.
On the other hand, except that the old phone didn’t keep its charge for very long, it did exactly what I wanted. It was equipped with something — no doubt now antiquated, but still — called a QWERTY keyboard, which slides out and makes texting easy. It had a camera, although I hardly took any pictures because they were always kind of bad. In fact, it had quite a lot of fancy features I had ignored. I never did try to hook it up to the Internet for email, or access various pre-installed apps.
Maybe all I needed was another simple phone like it?
Most of us know how foolish it feels when you go to the doctor only to find when you get there that whatever was ailing you had mysteriously disappeared. So it was with my cellphone.
A few weeks went by without my having decided what kind of a new one to buy when, one day, idly picking up the old one to gaze at it sentimentally, and maybe give it another good shake, I found it entirely operational. It had healed itself, or perhaps finally just dried out. Indecision sometimes pays off. Maybe I can still find an excuse to enlist my grandchildren: Does anyone know if you can access Instagram from a laptop?