Bye! Bye! Cell! Cell!

For the third consecutive year, I’ve failed to remember my blogoversary (July 10). It’s less a day of celebration, of course, than it is a reminder of the freedom that the googletubez provides to self-publish all sorts of inanity and foist jibberish upon unsuspecting websurfers who find themselves having mistakenly clicked into my little corner of the interwebz. Still, it’s one of my three favorite July anniversaries.

I remembered this belatedly because it was also around that time that I gave up my old rotary telephone and land-line.


Above: Phone sex just seemed ... better somehow back then.

Unfortunately, the reason that this occurred to me is that my cellular telephone is currently not in working order. As soon as it boots up and updates the time, it shuts down and reboots, cycling through its startup routine over and over again, until the last electron in the battery has left the cathode and the anode is bursting with negativity.

In other words, shit doan work.

There have been brief periods where I was rendered phoneless in my relatively short time here in the 21st century, but those times, while stress-inducing, were easily remedied by a quick trip to the local cellular telephone store to get a new SIM card. My current situation, however, requires that a replacement telephone be sent via over-the-ground delivery. Hello? M.I.T.? CalTech? Is anyone even working on teleportation these day? Where the hell are my tax dollars going, anyway?

Anyway, my not-so-enjoyable-to-speak-to service technician (who had quite an odd accent for someone name “Jane”) informed me that the replacement phone would arrive within 6 days.

SIX. FUCKING. DAYS.

One hundred and forty four hours of brutal isolation, of relentless loneliness with no interaction save the nonsensical voices in my head. I don’t even have a soccer ball to anthropomorphize! I mean, yeah, the Jews were out in the desert for forty years, but at least they could chat with each other to pass the time. My god, my god … o, that I had just one more day with my phone. I would cherish every syllable spoken, letting the smooth vowels wash across my ears like a lover’s touch on a soft cheek, anticipating the shock of the hard consonants with the giddiness that one does the impending submersion into a cold mountain lake just before splashdown. Phone, o sweet, sweet phone, on my good dog’s ashes, I promise that never again will I take you or what joy you bring for granted.

*lonely sigh ...*