On my way out of a Halloween party on Saturday, I accidentally drop-kicked my phone down two flights of stairs.
The party can be very clearly demarcated into two parts: before I drank the margarita and after I drank the margarita.
Me before the margarita: calmly chatting about knitting with a nice man who had knit the ears of his Clifford the Big Red Dog costume.
Me after the margarita: ‘You think getting broken up with by your girlfriend of three years is bad? I’M getting DIVORCED!’
I was told later that my roommate did try and remedy the situation by bringing me soda water under the guise of a tequila and seltzer, but I wasn’t quite drunk enough to not yell at her ‘I asked for a wine! Bring me a wine!’, to which she presumably muttered ‘your funeral’ and acquiesced.
I was also told later that they replaced the lime juice in the margarita with triple sec, which explained a lot. It was a ‘colour-changing margarita’, made with purple cabbage ice cubes, but apparently the slow drip of cabbage into the drink didn’t dilute its alcoholic properties at all. So I was on my way home and kicked my phone down the stairs where the screen smashed into even more pieces than it was already in, had one last merry cigarette with the revelers outside, who wanted to do a magic trick on me which somehow ended up with me being given two dollars (score) and then stumbled home. Luckily the party was only about three blocks from my house otherwise I certainly would have been hit by an Uber and died.
Anyway. My hardy iPhone somehow survived all of this, its only complaint embedding tiny pieces of broken plastic into my thumb whenever I used it, until on Wednesday I was heading out to get lunch when it fell out of a poorly designed pocket and crashed to the floor, never to move again.
This generation’s (and the next’s, and presumably the next’s) attachment to their electronic devices and how pathetic it is is well-trodden territory. No reinventing of the wheel here. But it still made me sad and uncomfortable when I realized how debilitating a couple of hours without a phone was.
I made an appointment with the aficionados at ‘U Break It I Fix It’ in downtown Brooklyn, and was immediately faced with a litany of issues. How do I get there without Google maps? Google it at home, you’re screaming, but then remember the directions? What am I, a sat nav? I literally cannot hold more than one turn in my head at once, and, when out biking, can be found constantly muttering ‘right on Classon, left on Madison, right on Tompkins’ only to forget immediately and have to pull my bike over to check the next step after every single turn. Also: the best way to get there was the bus. But I couldn’t take the bus, because my Metrocard was out of money since my roommate dragged me into the 21st century and made me start using Apple Pay to use public transport, and Apple Pay was on my Apple Phone. An Uber then? Oh, wait. A real cab? Which have been driven (heh) out of business by Uber?
In the end I plumped for the subway and hoped I would find a kindly stranger to direct me once I got out at the other end. Since I assumed that ‘U Break It I Fix It’ was not saved on most people’s ‘want to go’ lists, I memorized the street names as best I could and headed out into that fearsome afternoon.
After a somewhat embarrassing consultation at the phone shop where the guy asked me to remove the case and I informed him it was the only thing holding the phone together – I took it off to reveal that the back case was also a giant crack, and then a piece of it broke off in his hand – Do you want this? He asked, No, I said – I struggled against further panic. My friend the night before had asked me to cat-sit for her over Thanksgiving and I had said no, because I didn’t want to. I had texted her when I got home to say sorry for not wanting to and she had replied saying it was fine, but I hadn’t got around to replying yet. So now she might think I was mad at her, which in turn would make her mad at me. There was no way to rectify this situation! I just had to wait! And mea-culpa my ass off when I got my phone back! I was meant to talk to one of my friends in London on the phone that day, and the time of our call was rapidly approaching! How did I contact her! I pulled up Facebook messenger on my computer and sent a desperate missive. Did people use Facebook messenger any more? I could hear Mark Zuckerburg laughing at me from the Meta-verse. And what if one of the jobs I had been applying for tried to call me while my phone was in the shop? What if there was an emergency and someone needed to contact me for some unknown reason? What if our super was trying to call me to say he had finally fixed the boiler (yeah, the heating went off again. I miss the Bahamas)? What if I saw something funny on the street on my way to the phone store and couldn’t take a picture of it? What did it all mean, anyway?
I was talking to a colleague a few years ago about the gap year she took before university. She is a couple of years older than me and would have been around 19 at the time, so it was basically the dark ages of the internet. I remember she told me she used to email her parents every two weeks to confirm she was still alive. Can you imagine that? Or how she would meet someone in Rio and have a great time, and plan to somehow meet up in São Paulo via the medium of leaving each other PAPER MESSAGES PINNED TO ACTUAL PINBOARDS IN THE HOSTEL LOBBY.
People used to have to stick to their word (said Grandma). If you told someone you were going to be somewhere at a certain time, you had to fucking be there at that time, or they could just wander off into the ether and you would never see them again. People used to have to read maps. People used to talk to each other on public transport instead of staring at their own blurred reflections in their phones!
Then again, people didn’t used to be able to work from home and therefore take two hour breaks in the middle of the day to get your phone fixed, or to get divorced, or what have you, so I guess it wasn’t all good back then.
And yet, this thing that carries basically all the information and help that I need to function as a human being is treated like crap by me at every possible juncture. I drop it probably every fifteen minutes. I treat it about as well as I treat my body, that long suffering bag of organs, drinking and smoking and not exercising or sleeping and yet expecting it to carry me around all day every day and getting annoyed at it for getting out of breath when walking up gentle inclines. There’s a moral to this story somewhere, but the only one I can think of is get a better phone case, which doesn’t seem far-reaching enough.
One good thing:
When I was out and about yesterday I managed to not see and then step in a giant pile of vomit, which proceeded to lodge itself into every groove of my shoes. Two separate strangers came up to me and offered helpful suggestions of how to get it off. Who said New Yorkers aren’t friendly.
Also: yesterday my sister ran a 50 mile race because she is a fucking beast and I can’t believe I’m related to her.
One bad thing:
The giant pile of vomit, obviously.