Wells, Cargo, and Person Voted Least Likely to Get an iPhone

The day began innocently enough: I was to run to Wells Fargo, make a deposit, get some cash and hand it over to Ms Karyn so she could do the shopping errands. I shudda known, I shudda known! She was casually listing the stops she would make, none of which I wished to visit (TJ Maxx, Ross, Trader Joe's, and maybe Tuesday Morning). Each of those places exist to make me carsick, I'm sure of it. In a casual gesture of what I was later to call "brilliance," she threw out the hook. "And maybe Barnes & Nobles, if there's time."

I love book stores. She knows it. It was hardly an even match. Suddenly I was interested in the errands, figuring, wrongly, that we would zoom through the worst of the retail establishments in record time, ending on that Barnes and Noble note I so covet. I threw on my cargo shorts, a shirt and some comfortable shoes. Because we were going to be gone a while, I turned on my phone and put it into one of the 34 pockets most cargo pants have.

Four hours later, bedraggled and bereft of anything resembling energy, I stripped off my clothing and took a much needed nap. Karyn, mysteriously energized by her shopping, decided to forego the nap and do a a few loads of laundry. A couple hours later I awoke all refreshed and reached for my cargo shorts. Gone. Hmmm. They only had four hours of tread wear---why not get some more mileage out of them? I'm flexible, though, so I put on some tennis shorts and went in search of my cell phone to make a few calls. Gone. I called out for help."Have you seen those shorts I had on when we went out?"

"What's wrong with the ones you're wearing?" she asked. "Nothing," I explained, "but they don't have my cell phone in the pocket."

You know the look: startled dear in the headlights. She ran to the laundry room, well, we both did, but she actually moved knobs and dials to stop the washer. (Why? Because I don't actually know how; not surprisingly, we never have arguments about the universal TV remote, either, because she's the only one who knows how it works.) She reached in, pulled out the cargo shorts and kept repeating the mantra, "I checked the pockets, I'm sure of it."

In pocket number 27, the thoroughly washed cellphone materialized. It was very clean, and very dead. Now this exact thing happened to her own phone--the free phone we got with the expensive one--several months earlier. She pulled hers out of the dryer, though, and it worked just fine. No such luck with my phone. Maybe we should have put it through the dryer.

I traipsed down to the one store I hate more than all others: AT&T phone center. I see the pretty pictures all over the wall for the new iPhone. I make a snap decision: I'll take one. Fire it up for me. Uh, no, sorry ma'am, no can do. To use the phone, one must plug it into the computer, activate it though iTunes, sync it with all the music we never figured out how to put on the iPod, attach one's bookmarks, integrate one's email addresses, assign special ringtones to special names, etc., etc. It's important to remember here that I am the one who doesn't know how to turn off the clothes washer, doesn't know how to use the TV remote and failed miserably at my earlier attempt to upload a movie onto this blog.

We had no success trying to activate the phone on my PC, but, fortunately, Karyn has an iMac. It was a breeze. ("Gee," she said, "this would be a neat phone for me, since everything I have is Apple.") [Oh, I really don't think so.] Anyway, we're still working out the finer points of this remarkable piece of technology. They "gave" me (price: $15, what a rip!) a flash thing with all my phone numbers, supposedly taken off the SIM card in my clean, dead old phone. We'll soon find out if I still have your phone number.

I mention all this because during the activation process, I was assured that if I had any old voicemail, it would be history, irretrievable, kaput, dead as the old phone. So, if you called me, any time after Thursday, I don't know it. If you don't hear from me, the flash card didn't work, and I don't have your phone number. If a year passes without word from me, check out the AT&T store. I'm there, in a long line, buying a cheap phone with two buttons: dial and answer. No Internet, no photos, no bookmarks, no voicemail, no email, no music, no YouTube and...no problem.