On the existence of cell phones

It’s eight o’clock and I just finished my lab work for today. Instead of going home I feel like writing even though I’m really tired and the pain in my arm is bigger each day from both using the laptop and pipetting every day. But I can’t help it, the words are waiting impatiently to being written. And they’re not even wise words. Not even deep, not even interesting. Just random thoughts in my mind. Quoting Catarina Fonseca in her recent book “Clube das Encalhadas”, if you don’t want to read, skip to the end, but don’t complain you don’t get anything of the story.
Last Sunday I dropped my cell phone, my beautiful Nokia 6101, sorry for the advertising. It was inside my bag so I didn’t see the effect of the drop until I pulled it out to see what time it was. At this point I should tell you that all my watches are broken, and I rely solely on my cell phone to tell me what time it is. I tried guessing by the position of the sun, but it just didn’t work out. And people tend to get angry if you set appointments to “when the sun is setting down”. I looked at my cell phone. Nothing. I tried to turn it on and off. Nothing. It was alive, yes, I could hear the little beeping noises created when I pushed every key in the hope of reviving it, but it showed nothing on the screen. My cell phone was…. BLIND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And I felt blind with it. My contacts, my pictures, my CLOCK! The very thing that allows me to wake up in the morning, the alarm clock, was impossible to set. Ok, I had my differences in the past with this alarm clock, and I do tend to ignore it most of the time, but I still feel close to it, like to a relative that you hate to see at your doorstep, but still let in, quickly hiding your favorite cookies out of sight. On Monday, I relied on my housemate Rodrigo (yes, he’s new) and on Clea to wake me up with heavy knocking on my door and phone calls. Yes, because I could receive phone calls, I just couldn’t see who was calling, which can be dangerous.
Monday went by and my phone was still as blind as a mole. I asked everyone, in the hope that the brains studying here at Rice University could come up with a solution for my cell phone. “Buy a new cheap one”, they said. As if I could do such a thing. First, because there is no such thing as cheap, second, because I really liked this phone, it has a deeper meaning to me, since I bought it from Maya, who was eager to buy her new phone, the recently recovered from a drinking problem Motorola RZR (see comments of last post). No way I was going to give up on it that easily. Clea suggested “Drop it once more, maybe it will work again”, in that wisdom that decades ago made people face high voltage as a good solution for problematic behaviors. I sniggered.
On Tuesday, while I was pouring plates and thinking of how I will manage to make my new undergraduate student (yeah, I got one, they’re also known as “slaves”!!!) actually help me instead of destroying my already sensitive experiment, my phone, sensing my desperation, took a plunge to the ground from the back pocket of my trousers. “Shit”, I thought, “as if it wasn’t broken enough…”. When I turned it to me, I saw…. It was telling me: --:--
My phone could see again!!!!!!!!!!! I could see as well! He had come out of his vision-coma, and was asking me “Where am I?” and “Who am I?” and “Please insert time and date”. So I did, and the world shifted back to normal.
What is the take home message of this story? Cell phones have mysterious ways. They seem connected to us at a level that not even cats and dogs manage. Not even boyfriends! You can count on them to wake you up, to give you detailed messages from dear friends, to put you in touch with the world, and if they are dropped they eventually come back to you without big complaints, which is something a boyfriend hardly ever does.
However… Sometimes, when you’re expecting that call, cell phones can be a bitch, and give you the impression that you’re lonelier than ever. Just because they’re not ringing.