Cell Phone Graves

My daughter’s phone is “toast.” We remedy this by rummaging through our stash of old and broken phones, searching for one that works well enough to replace her’s which is currently inoperable, and this will have to do for now.

As I watched my husband bring  the motherlode of shattered phones to the kitchen to decide which one was most viable, I said to him, “I wonder. Will we have more broken hearts, or more broken cell phones when we die?”  I’m hoping it’s phones because there are already so many of them!

Years ago, with five people on smart phones, and three of them still fairly young, our foray into the care and maintenance of cell phones was rough.  Phones were dropped, stepped on, even lost in the woods where a good samaritan found it two weeks later, took it home, charged it up and called us.   I never thought I’d see that one again until – there it was, in my mail overnight with a note from the very nice little girl who found the shiny object on the dirt path, under the leaves.   I did have my daughter send her a thank you and a present in case you were wondering.

Over the years we have amassed many phones with shattered screens, water damage, or sometimes both. One of the funniest incidents (in hindsight of course) happened the night my oldest daughter was bragging about being the only one who hadn’t broken a phone.   While she gestured her arms wide, and said “EVERYBODY,” the phone flew from her hand, hit the concrete next to the edge of an in-ground pool, and then bounced in and sunk to the bottom.   It happened in slow motion I swear it.  Even nature muted while we watched it fly from her hand, hit the concrete, and swish slowly back and forth until it rested on the very, very, bottom.

But, that was several years ago and since then everybody’s attention to phone maintenance has significantly improved. Lucky for us.  Currently, with the exception of that one sad back-up phone in place, we all  do pretty well keeping our phones up, running, charged, and in good repair.    But my poor husband,  who waited a long time to get a new phone because somebody else always seemed to need one before him, just got the Galaxy Note 7.  You know, the one that catches on fire?  We charge it overnight in a heavy dutch oven so if it explodes we will be safe.

Now, the good news:  Today is the day when Samsung replacement phones are available so we can go back to a regular charging set up and put the red pot back on the stove where it can be used for other burned things  – like my pot roast.

I might make a tiny cell phoned shaped cake in honor of the occasion.  But I don’t want  jinx things.