The day began around 7:20 am when I woke up to my husband’s alarm going off.
No wait, the day began around 5am when I woke up to the sound of crying through the baby monitor. I stumbled out of bed to go and get the crying toddler and bring him into our bed. I stumbled back out to run to the loo. I fell back into bed. Checked the time on my phone. Saw a message from a friend that I didn’t read. Fell asleep again.
The thing is, The Mister’s alarm is set for later than mine. It was therefore with a rising feeling of dread that I flailed around for my phone only to find it impersonating a dodo. Very very dead dodo. No lights from the charger. No response to any buttons. No sign of life whatsoever.
As with most folks of my generation and younger, I am attached to my phone. Perhaps for the worse, perhaps for the better, I rely on it for everything from keeping my life organised, to staying connected, to acting as an escape for when I want to ignore everything around me and take a mental break. But fundamentally, I also need to be reliably contactable all the time, especially now with so much going on in our lives.
Also, I’m not exactly someone you would describe as a morning person at the best of times, so this plunged me into a deep tailspin of headless running around in a state of panicked confusion, trying to brush my teeth, get dressed, find out if we have an old working phone for a replacement, and dodging the toddler. The Mister finally caught me at some point in my frantic circuit about the flat to tell me to breathe, calm down, and take a taxi at lunch break to one of the phone shops to upgrade my phone. Something I was planning to do eventually, maybe in the New Year, just not right now.
He also took the toddler away to bring him to creche, so I could collapse back down on the bed in relative quiet (if not peace) to get ready for work, trying to gather up my remaining scattered brain cells. However, I did feel better having made the decision to do as The Mister suggested, so I was able to pull myself together and sally forth.
It was as I was sallying forth out of the lift in my office that I suddenly heard the familiar strains of my alarm clock tone coming from my coat pocket that my newfound calmness began to unravel again. WTF??? I thought to my self.
My phone had decided to have a lie in. After spending an hour or so playing dead it decided to wake up, ringing my alarm as if to pretend that nothing had happened. Even then, it took a full restart to successfully unlock my SIM card.
I stared at it suspiciously. Did I trust it? Should I postpone the upgrade? I absolutely adore my Nexus phone but cannot afford any of Google’s current offerings so I had slowly been resigning myself to getting used to a Samsung. But I hadn’t quite gotten there yet. Yes, the camera and processing speed will be a big upgrade for me, but the experience of running pure android with no third party software overlay has been delicious for me.
In the end, practicality and precaution won out. I need to have a reliable phone. I know I was right to sacrifice my lunch for phone shopping when my SIM card locked up twice more during the day and I missed a call from my boss even though I was holding my phone the whole time and it never rang. I have been missing notifications lately and it all adds to the already high levels of stress.
So instead of sleeping, or writing more interesting things about the zoo, I have spent the evening researching shockproof phone cases (an absolutely essential item for me).
On a funnier note, as the day degenerated into more chaos and my brain scattered further and further afield leaving me more exposed to say and do the ridiculous, I found myself accidentally saying in front of three of my bosses (mixed company, no less) that I was “a big fan of nuts”. Ladies and gentlemen, I do not work in a very politically correct office (unless you’re dealing with HR). So even though the completely legitimate context involved discussion of mint chocolate Lindt versus hazelnut chocolate Lindt bars, there was a very very pregnant pause followed by chortling and snorting and general laughter. And that’s without even the presence of our team leader, who would have taken that statement and ran somewhere even more inappropriate with it. Perhaps it is that we are all slightly frazzled and stressed out in peak litigation season and we all needed that laugh to relieve the tension. But it just demonstrated to me clearly that in my current state I am a danger to myself and others and I should just stay at home in bed for the next week, just in case I accidentally stick my foot even further down my throat and require surgical extraction.
Not to be outdone in front of my colleagues, I messaged The Mister on my way to creche to pick up Hawkeye.
“Based solely on the day I’m having, I expect our child to be covered in paint and wearing only underpants when I show up to collect him in a few minutes.”
He replied instantly with his usual sharp sense of humour:
“Well, make sure the first coat is fully dry before applying the second, or the whole lot will just peel.”
Perhaps I should have said “underpaint” instead of “underpants”? I mean, I did have to go put a coat on him…
The Feathered Rose 