It's a cheap party trick: I pull out my phone, flip it open to check the time or send a quick text, and watch for the reactions. In the decades I've owned a flip phone, people have given me a few double takes. Recently, though, when I opened my phone to squint at a photo texted to me, the person sitting across the conference table surprised me with a "Haha! I love your phone!" And I did, too. I loved my flip phone. Then, in a deadly mistake of distracted domesticity, I scooped it up with my bed sheets and dropped it in the washing machine: Eco Cold, extra spin. Oh gentle readers, the tragedy of beautiful T9 predictive text programming drowned at the bottom of the linens spin cycle! Yes, I lost saved phone numbers, the blurry store photos I'd snapped over the years to double check prices when back to internet access, the text threads with details about addresses and meet-ups... all lost. Sad, inconvenient, annoying, frustrating, all of it. But the biggest tragedy, ...
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So I am sitting reading a portion of Acts for my Greek translation project and from the building outside my balcony I hear a "disturbance" and things falling down stairs. I went out on my balcony, and a young man and couple gals where throwing things like telephones and epithets at each other. The guy got in his car to drive away, but a cell phone bouncing off his paint job encouraged him to get out of the car and hurl a few more choice words in reply.
I asked one girl if everything was alright and she asked me to call the police - because her phone was broken. I just got my handy-dandy phone book today, so I looked up the non-emergency number, but went back to my balcony before I dialed. I asked her if she still wanted me to call, and she said her friend was already calling. She apologized profusely for the disturbance, and I said not to worry, but to holler if ever there was trouble because I'm always here studying at night.
Things have calmed down now. And now I know the number for the police.
And maybe your turtle left because it was jealous that Chule could make bigger p**ps on the kitchen floor than he could.