All Wet

So yeah, because I am me, I jumped in the lake the other day with my phone.  I put it in a plastic baggie, like I normally do, except that I used the off brand sandwich bag instead of the Ziploc ® Freezer Bag.  So the seal didn’t stick.  Not that I would normally jump in the lake even if I had used the Freezer Bag.  Normally, I would put the plastic bagged phone in the bag with all the towels.  But alas, in a fit of helpfulness, my children had already brought the towel bag down to the dock, so I stuck the phone in my pocket and then promptly forgot about it.  (An aside – the kids never seem to use the towels, as the bag is still crammed with neatly folded towels at the end of every trip, and yet somehow the wet-towel-around-the-house to people ratio stays around three to one.) 

 Yes, I forgot about my pocketed, bagged phone until I yelled, “Cannonball” and flung my middle aged body off the side of the pontoon boat and then felt something rectangular bang against my leg as I plunged in the water.

 I tried drying it out, and I got it to the point where I could make and receive phone calls using the blue tooth thingie in my car, and sometimes I could receive phone calls using just the phone itself.  It intermittently worked otherwise.  But not mittently enough, so I was forced to go get a new phone.  Blah blah, I won’t bore you with the transaction, except to say that somehow I was convinced this go round to buy the insurance, despite the fact that the math didn’t really seem to work out unless I kill the phone within the next six months or so.  Which, I guess, is likely, given my proclivity for, well, for being me.

 It’s not a huge deal, goodness knows, since for the first thirty or so years of my life I didn’t even have a cell phone.  Modern society, however, especially modern momming and lawyering, requires that you not go five seconds without responding to a phone call/email/text message, etc., lest someone assume you are either dead in a ditch without the ability to so much as call home and leave a message or that you are deliberately ignoring the sender and making a very personal comment on what you think of their needs.  Horsehockey, you may say, and I won’t disagree with the editorial comment about the hockeyness of the horses, but I triple dog dare any of you to deny the prickly reality of it.

 Like any new electronic purchase, the first three or four hours or so of ownership are devoted to setting the blamed thing up and trying your best not to throw it across the room when it doesn’t cooperate.  I mean, how am I supposed to remember my Instagram password when the last time I had to remember it was the last time I got a new phone?  I can’t even remember what email address I used to set it up, since I have about 17 email addresses, all used for various purposes, and all with different POP-3 server codes (whatever that is) if I want to get the emails on my phone. 

 There’s also the games, AKA things to do while wearing a paper gown sitting on a high table for 45 minutes in a doctor’s office.  Plants vs. Zombies is my favorite phone game.  I’ve killed a lot of zombies in my day, and to be perfectly honest there are times when shooting at cartoon zombies with Pea Shooters and blowing them up with Potato Mines is better than a glass of wine or prescription medication for taking my mind off of the worries of the day and relaxing me.  I’m good at Plants vs. Zombies, better than my kids even, which is saying something for a woman whose high score on Flappy Bird is 1.  On my old phone, I unlocked all the bonus rounds and mini games, and had completed nearly all the Achievements.  My Zen garden was robust, and I had coins to spare.  Now I have to start from scratch, and that may be the part that makes me the saddest about this whole phone ordeal.  After all, all the good pictures I had already uploaded to Facebook.

 I’ll get over it.  The fact that I can do all these things while sitting in my weather-tight air conditioned home I can actually afford, sitting in a comfortable LaZBoy with an over full belly and drinking the beverage of my choice proves that I don’t have any real problems.

 But STILL.  I had all the icons where I wanted them.  All my passwords were memorized.  Life was good, and Zombies didn’t stand a chance. 

 Ah, who am I kidding.  Those Zombies still don’t stand a chance.

 Lori B. Duff is the author of the Amazon ‘Hot New Release’ Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza, a collection of autobiographical humor essays.  You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/loribduffauthor