There was a day when I could walk and chew gum at the same time. I keep forgetting that “back in the day” is, for me, “back in the decade.” It was my recent attempt at multi-tasking that brought me to trouble.
For years I had a simple cell phone. No camera, no gadgets, no gee-whiz apps or software — just a phone. Most of the young people looked at my phone as if it were a rotary phone or a record … something ancient.
So it was that I decided to upgrade in a big way. I made the leap from a dinosaur phone to a newfangled, high-powered, bells and whistles mini-computer called “The Droid.” There must be thousands of applications and dozens, yea, hundreds, of things to do with it. The Droid actually takes much better photos than does my digital camera. It is a wondrous hand-held machine.
One recent evening my brother called and, somewhere during the conversation, I remembered that the swimming pool needed salt. So, I grabbed my trusty K-Bar (a Marine Corps fighting knife), a 40-pound bag of salt, and headed toward the deep end of the pool, talking up a storm all the while. I set the salt bag on the diving board, slit it with my K-Bar, and began to pour the salt into the pool.
Which is when the Droid squirted from my hand and swan-dived into the pool and quickly sank to the bottom nine feet below.
I almost dived in after it, but I remembered that I had on dress shoes, a wallet filled with credit cards, and a key to the car that is also electronic. By the time I had divested myself of street clothes, the Droid had been submerged for several minutes. It was the day the Droid died.
I lost over 650 telephone numbers (no, I didn’t back it up on Gmail or on the computer), a number of photographs, and whatever else was stored on this little piece of equipment that contained far more computer power than did the space craft that landed on the moon in 1969.
Oh, I also dropped the bag of salt into the water and the K-Bar nearly landed point down on my foot.
I have since been told of people that dropped their cell phones into lakes, oceans, cups of coffee or soft drinks … quite a few people have deposited their phone in the toilet. Others have dropped them accidentally over cliffs or out of high-rise windows. One cell phone was left in jeans and washed in the laundry.
One Facebook friend said, “I was fishing on a dock at Stamford Lake when I discovered a spider was inside my t-shirt, I took it off fast and alas, my cell was in the pocket. It arched out into the lake like a champion cliff diver.”
The most interesting phone loss was a former Army Green Beret who served three tours in Vietnam who lost his phone in a portable toilet at a softball game — and retrieved it!
Those Special Forces guys are tough. I don’t know of any Marines who would go Port-a-John diving for a cell phone. A beer, maybe, but not a cell phone.
Anyway, I did have the good sense to insure it and, one day after I made a claim, UPS delivered the fresh new Droid to my front door.
Now, I am in the process of typing in 650 names and phone numbers and trying to remember what settings I had on the dead Droid.
I am keeping this one away from the water. And, just to be on the safe side, I’ve decided not to try to walk and chew gum at the same time. I’m not as good as I once was.
[David Epps is the pastor of the Cathedral of Christ the King, 4881 Hwy. 34 E., Sharpsburg, GA 30277. Services are held Sundays at 8:30 and 10 a.m. (www.ctkcec,org). He is the bishop of the Mid-South Diocese (www.midsouthdiocese.org) and may be contacted at [email protected].]
