Cell Phone Scare

My wife and I have similar looking cell phones. We leave them sitting on the counter in the kitchen recharging when we're at home. For whatever reason, my lovely wife took mine instead of hers as she left for work. Of course, I was unaware of this until I was about 10 miles down the road.

I wasn't in the car for more than ten minutes and a sudden, overwhelming sense of nervousness washed through me as I tried to come to grips with my cellphoneless self.

I couldn't believe what was happening. "What happens if I break down? What happens if a family member needs to get a hold of me?" I thought. Never mind that prior to the mid 1990s, most people never had cell phones and if something happened while you were away from the phone, say in the car on a trip, you found out once you got home. If you broke down, you found something called a payphone. What happened to those things anyway?

All of that didn't matter and I still felt naked without my phone.

Over the last several years without even realizing it, that little cell phone had become a part of my day-to-day existence. Granted, I don't use it all that much but still, it was a dishartening feeling knowing that my only means of communication was missing. Imagine your life without a limb? You would eventually you learn to live without it but initially, the shock of having only one limb would be life altering.

So my metaphor is a bit of a stretch but today for about 45 minutes, I felt like my life was significantly altered. What the hell was wrong with me? Was I am becoming the person that I make fun of everyday as I drive to work? You know, FREAKY-CELL-PHONE-USER that has that damn phone permanently affixed to his or her ear. I hope not.

At least I had my PDA on me in the event that had to quickly parooze a PDF file in a pinch.