Sidekick Epic Fail

I’ve had a Sidekick for four years now. Not the same one– I have a tendency to pour water on them or smash them or somehow get super glue all over them, so about once a year I am faced with the prospect of either replacing it or upgrading to something else. The problem is, the only thing better is the iPhone and that is barely a phone. As a device thingy, it’s great. As a phone, I usually end up asking people who call me from their iPhones to just send me the short film they made using their phones while waiting for the bus instead. I mean, it’s fun to try and guess what words might fill in the blanks left by the iPhone constantly cutting out– “So listen, I was at ______ and this_____ came up to me and said ________________________________ seventeen times__________ dead hooker!____________Tijuana___________ prison.” But as far as real communication goes, the iPhone needs to drop its carrier.

Which is why I still have my trusty Sidekick (also, I enjoy being down with the hip-hop teenagers, who seem to be the only other people still clinging to their Sidekicks). But recently my phone epically failed me when an over-the-air update crashed the system and wiped out mine (and everyone else’s– but who cares about them, this is MY rant) contacts. And my photos of things I’ve found on the street that are weird and/or give me the creeps, my 12-second video clip of The Kooks playing at the Palladium last fall, my customized butterfly-themed background, my smattering of poorly chosen ringtones assigned to all the wrong people (who for the most part stopped calling me a year ago,) and saddest of all, my $2.99 Bling Watch app that displayed a diamond-encrusted “watch” which was hard to read but made my phone look fancy. Oh, and my contacts. All of them. I didn’t have a single number saved anywhere, because the Sidekick was supposed to take care of that for me. It did not. Basically, I knew my mom’s number. And the first half of my ex-boyfriend’s number, which I used for avoidance purposes only.

Now, I’m a big fan of deleting people who I feel aren’t pulling their weight in the friendship arena. Generally, I write down their number somewhere on a piece of paper and hide it from myself or commit the most distinctive parts of their number, like the weird Colorado area code or the fun number combinations like 420 or 69 or whatever, to my tiny and already over-strained memory. Then I sit and wait for them to realize how cool and how much fun to hang out with I was, and then they (hopefully, finally) call me and everything is awesome again. I do this for their protection as much as mine– I try to restrain myself from unnecessary petulance and other irritating habits, but clearly, as I’m dedicating and entire blog entry to whining about my phone, restraint is not one of my strong suits. I have a hard time not telling anyone who will listen whatever is running though my mind at any given moment, so if a friend is already shunning me, I don’t want to push them over the edge with a ton of inane text messages.

But having 420 as part of someone number doesn’t really help when you want to call them to try and get tickets to a show they have a hookup for.  For the past two weeks I’ve been getting random text messages from people I haven’t heard from in over a year, and each one I have to write back to with the awkward “um, my phone deleted you, is this so-and-so?” Well, sometimes so-and-so just writes back with an angry note about my premature deleting habits and the friendship bridge is finally burned. But honest! It was the phone, not me this time.I had nothing to do with it. But on some level, I am enjoying the fresh start. In a way, it is the ultimate friendship test. The people who reached out first were generally the people I talked tot he most anyway. The rest can trickle in as slowly as they want. I have a legitimate get-out-of-jail free card this time, so don’t hate on me.

At least my closest friends believed me, but my cat doesn’t even use text messaging, so she doesn’t really count…