Apr 5, 2016 3 min read

You know that moment of sheer panic when you think you’ve lost your cellphone? It’s the one followed by relief once you realize it was in the bottom or your purse or in your back pocket or just about anywhere except in someone else’s purse or back pocket. How did we ever function before we had these devices?

That’s the feeling I experienced a few weeks ago when I killed my smartphone. Yes, I killed it. Call it phonacide. Technically, it was accidental phoneslaughter since I didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident and a pure act of stupidity. I was multi-tasking (which is a nice way of saying I was doing too much at once). In this instance, I was checking sports scores while walking into the ladies room at work. I set my phone on the counter and heard a loud whack a few moments later. Then, I saw my phone lying facedown on the ceramic tile floor.

I ran to its side, picked it up and desperately pushed buttons afraid of what I might see (or the display I might not see.) At the very bottom of my fancy smartphone ran a thin green line that was the first evidence of what was a fatal brain bleed. Over the next half hour, my poor smartphone started to hemorrhage, and that green line became a black blur taking over the entire screen.

I panicked, wondering what I could do to save it, how much money it was going to cost me to replace it and how long I would be without the ability to make mobile calls and use all sorts of social media apps that completely waste my time. By the time I got home from work, the LCD brain bleed was gushing and the patient had a grim prognosis. I knew I couldn’t save it, but I could salvage my photos. I plugged it into my computer and transferred all of the photos, including my Italy vacation pictures, as fast as I could.

By the next morning, my phone was dead. When I told the young man at the cellphone store I hadn’t backed up my contacts or anything else to their imaginary “cloud” because I didn’t think anyone else needed to be able to hack into my stuff, he told me there was no way to retrieve anything from my phone and that I was too paranoid about privacy.

Happily, I got my replacement phone overnight and am being much more careful with it. I even send stuff to the “cloud” almost every day just to be safe.

That case is closed, but the mystery of last week’s hit-and-run on our corner telephone pole that knocked out our home phone and Internet service is still unsolved. Another case of phonacide.

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.