What is up with me and phones this week?



How do you like my new car phone?


I had to go scrape up a temporary replacement for my trusty old cell phone last night after it "bit the shed". This new one gets good signal all the time but the volume control straight up sucks... and I can never hear the people on the other end of the line...

But HEY, I'm CONNECTED ONCE AGAIN!!

See, I had just gotten home from playing out at Open Mike night. It was a great "show", if you could call it that. Played with pieces of another band as well as this singer/songwriter who has been recorded and published nationally. We actually had some great conversation regarding music and had come to the most excellent conclusion that our musical tastes and aspirations lay along the same bent and, hey, could we take the dive and start forming a band and start recording and performing live? Yeah, I was giddier than a teenage girl at a Coldplay concert. I wet my knickers... okay, maybe that's not entirely true.

But, that was my whole intention of getting into the whole Open Mike thing in the first place - to try to get a band together.

Why? I'll be the first to admit being what is known as a "crowd whore"... I suppose this is a modern-day equivalent of a "glory hound" but really, it's the same thing. Crowds getting off on your tunage is a major rush... not better than MOST sex (or recoil, for those gun-toting individuals), but cheaper and better than Michoacan... not that I would PERSONALLY know... oh no, not at all. (Let's take a look at those facts - musician with long hair experiment with drugs? Never.)

So. I get home. I decide to call my "executive assistant" and one of my very best friends, L***, who knows all about my tiny little "dream" of a band to bask in the good news with her.. no sooner did I dial the number... the screen goes blank. Do what?

Power switch.... nothing.

Dead battery? Plug in the wall charger... still nothing.

Whack it a few times. Nope.

A few more times.. REALLY HARD. Nothing.

Crap. (That banging on the electronics equipment thing is the last resort of the technically minded, of course...)

Well, how many cell phone users out there have suddenly suffered through a disconnect of this sort through no reason of their own? This means, you weren't expecting it for such reasons as

1. not paying the bill, duh
2. washing your cell phone in your jeans
3. loaning your cell phone to a near klepto
4. throwing your cell phone across the parking lot cause you got ticked off at the significant-(ly annoying) other

Etc. Well, for those of you in the "I suddenly got dis-umbilicalled from the world" club, I hear your pain.

First there is frustration. Then the fear that you may be missing some important phone call - although, like me, you probably later realized that, honestly, how many of these phone calls are actually all THAT important? I mean, really? And for most of those, did you really WANT to answer that call?

After this, denial. SURELY my phone did NOT break on me. A few more futile stabs at the power button does prove me wrong, again... and again... and again. Okay, so I'm stubborn.

So I had to use *gasp* someone else's cell phone, with all their cell phone cooties all over it, to call around and secure another phone for use while I consider what steps to take next.

Lucky for me, my sis-in-law had an old Nokia I could make use of. Yeah, that's it. Lucky. I mean... it does the job. It can dial out. It can receive calls. It has 12 whole different ring tones and a bright MULTICOLOR screen.

Okay, so it's MULTI-color if you consider blue and black being "multi". But, hey, it works, right?

Yeah, I was on ebay 20 minutes after I got this phone up and running to find another phone like my old phone. Of course, denial must still be in effect - been so all day... I keep checking it every once in a while just to make ABSOLUTELY sure that it isn't the battery... or perhaps I didn't press hard enough... or maybe I just need to disassemble the cover and put it back on again. Or how about a few more whacks? Another? And another?

Dammit. I lost the ebay auction too....