The Mobile Curse

I seem to be under some sort of wretched curse. Maybe not me, but rather my cell phones. Each cell phone I have had for the past 4 years has fallen under the curse. I can't remember the details of the first few, because I had not yet realized the cloud they lie under. I know that I left one in a taxi within weeks of having initially arrived in Shanghai. It never came back. The curse became quite apparent when we lived in our little lane house in Shanghai. While everyone else could hold conversations on their phones within my house, somehow I could not. To accept a phone call, I had to step out into the lane. Young children made this rather irresponsible, and rain made this quite miserable. One rather awful afternoon, trying to complain to my husband, I became fed up with my inability to communicate my sob stories effectively and threw the phone across the room.

It didn't come back.

Dave thought me rather irresponsible, and forbade me buy a new phone. He gave me his old one, with all of the numbers worn off. It did seem to get better coverage, but was rather miserable to use.

After a while, I searched my friends' closets for spare phones. Plenty of folks had them, and one friend was happy to hand hers out. With this, I moved onto another old phone. Its numbers weren't worn off, but it did have some funny quirks. For instance, I couldn't lock the keypad, which led to some rather annoying butt-dialing. I doggedly stuck with this phone for months. And then, I lost all of my baby weight in sight of Christmas. I decided to combine the two, and get myself a good phone.

We crossed into Hong Kong this December, and picked out a lovely little mobile phone. A skinny little Nokia with wireless ability, a good camera and a keypad. A quality phone costing me about $300.

It didn't work.

I didn't realize it for a few weeks - I thought maybe it was just slow, and still warming up. I thought this until one day the phone simply wouldn't turn on. It never did again. But since I bought it in Hong Kong, I couldn't take it back until the next time I went to Hong Kong in early February. The shop sent it back on the warranty. I got it back the next time I went to Hong Kong, in late February.

Finally, I had a good phone!

And it really was good. It worked beautifully, carried calls well, locked without any trouble, woke me up in the morning, and generally made me happy by allowing me to never think about my phone.

This lasted about 4 weeks, because then we moved to America. I had to wait a week for my new SIM card to arrive. A bit of a mess bringing an unlocked mobile phone into America, but we had it figured out and bought the SIM cards and the calling plans up front. I was online again, and began stocking my phone with American phone numbers.

One week later, I spent a late evening out with friends and made a nasty spill on my jeans. Home at 3am, I peeled off the jeans and threw them straight into the washer. Sadly, the phone went along with it. After spending the next day attached to a vaccuum, and the next week in a bag of rice, the phone was still dead.

Dave thought me rather irresponsible, and forbade me buy a new phone. I picked up a cheapie at Best Buy to last me through the vaccuum and the rice, and the junkiness of it drove me so crazy that I begged him to change his mind. One more phone - please. This time my choices were less, though. Only a few unlocked phones are available on the American market, and the Nokias all looked cheap. So I picked a Blackberry, and chose expedited shipping so that I could get on with my mobile and my life.

It arrived today.

It doesn't work.

Just thinking about it makes me want to scream.