(Dis)Connection

A connection was lost in a taxicab yesterday. It had probably been lost well before then.

When I "lost" my phone a month or so ago at the beach, I bought a Windows phone as an interim phone since it wasn't that expensive to hold me over until I could buy the new iPhone when it came out or until I get my iPhone back in November. This Windows phone proved comically frustrating. Yes, I am aware that bitching about a brand of smartphone reveals some jarring level of privilege, but trade in your iPhone for a Windows phone and let's see if you don't want to throw the phone against the wall. I had troubles figuring out how to make phone calls every time I tried to do so. I couldn't figure out how to set up voicemail - I am not even convinced it was possible on this phone. Everything about it made me angry. I no longer had the numbers of most of my friends. People would tell me that when they called me they would get a weird message saying that the subscriber could not be located.

I felt frustratingly disconnected from things because of this phone. And so yesterday when I lost it in a taxicab and the taxi driver called my friend I was with to tell me he had my phone and wanted to return it, I told him not to bother, that I hated the phone, and he could keep it, that I never wanted to see the phone again. It should also be added here so that I don't seem like the type of person who just loses his phones casually in taxis and then tells taxi drivers trying to return them that I don't want them, that I was insanely drunk by this point in the day.

I had gone to an all-you-can-drink brunch at Intermezzo with some friends to celebrate Nick's birthday, had gotten quite drunk there, and then had gone to the Rusty Knot, drank some more, and was on my way to Metropolitan to drink some more.

Jacob left for London today. He is going to school there for the next couple of years. This was on my mind yesterday in the taxi ride from one bar to the next. I texted him that I was going to miss him. This was the last text that phone ever sent. Hanging out with him quite a bit over the last month or so reopened some still not entirely healed part of my heart. I still have a great deal of affection for him and enjoyed very much seeing him.

Nick let me borrow his old iPhone. Once I got home from Metropolitan, I ordered a burrito and went about trying to set up this iPhone as my new phone. Apparently the last time I backed up my phone was sometime in the fall of 2011, or for some cruel reason this was the backup that my phone decided to install last night. The background image of my home screen was a picture of Jacob. There were a ton of photos of Jacob. My call history was nothing but calls to either Jacob, Erica, or New Mexico (the burrito place that was by my then house). There were a lot of beautiful moments that I had forgotten about. There were photos where I was smiling a lot, where Jacob was. I laughed because I think my phone was intentionally trying to fuck with me last night.

I brought in the phone to the AT&T store this morning on a break from work to get it activated and commiserated with the guy about having to work on Labor Day. He looked at the older model phone and with a bit of shade said, "Oh, you're going back to this."

"It's a long story. Just for a little while. Until the new phone comes out."