Kt No Phone Home: Blackberry Blackout, Coping with the Consequences of Cell Phone Casualties

    It went by many names, Blackberry, Crackberry, Burberry Crackberry, “That thing”, as in, “Are you actually sleeping with that thing?” and “Did you drop that thing again?”  In layman’s terms it was simply, a phone, and yet it is amazing how heavy the loss of a mere object can weigh on a person’s, read my, life.  My phone met with its long awaited end Saturday night due to injuries sustained in a piggyback race along 43rd street.  No, it had not been drinking.  The already frayed strap of my black clutch snapped, and the bag and phone hurtled some five feet, ten inches towards the pavement landing with a sound that is often placed in the “Well, that’s not good” category.  After several attempts at revitalization- putting the battery in, taking the battery out, charging it, not charging it, yelling at it, yelling at others, fierce spells of pushing the red power button, phone shopping online to show the Blackberry what cooler models it would be replaced with, forever, if it refused to cooperate- the truth sunk in, never again would I update my facebook status on this, my first Blackberry. I brought the phone to the AT&T store for a second opinion where a salesman in a blue stripped shirt, and solid blue tie told me, “Yeah, it’s dead, and you might want to think about updating that Cingular SIM card, because that company is old”.

    I peeled off the Blackberry’s black protective, read useless, cover one last time.  The phone looked so thin without its plastic cradle.  A black oval on the back cover marked where I had worn away at the finish by spinning the phone round and round on various tables and countertops.  The mysterious crack on the upper right hand side of the screen, absent one day, there the next.  The dirty track ball, a replacement acquired last summer when its predecessor came loose and rolled off the deck of a boat, doomed to forever flounder between the violent crests and troughs of the Atlantic Ocean.  All of these markings, byproducts of a four-year bond between my phone and myself, rendered as meaningless and useless as the shattered Nike stopwatch from 1996 kept in a plastic bag in the back of my desk drawer.

    But just as that watch was replaced, so too will a new Blackberry find a home in the back pocket of my jeans or deep in the pits of my bags, a new Blackberry I hope to call mine within three to five business days.  For now I am a slave to my computer.  Facebook and email windows are strategically scattered about my desktop, last resort lifelines called into action in a time of grave social need.  In the misquoted words of David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Blackberry”, and pray the SIM card was not damaged and it remembers my address book.

            In lieu of flowers, please send phone numbers when the new phone is activated.