Tuesday, November 16, 2010

white is the new blackberry


a few weeks ago, some {in clueless valley girl voice} LOSER, stole my blackberry. i actually have to take partial responsibility since i made it easy by being absent-minded and leaving it in public.  i had only had the phone for about 6 months and didn't have insurance on it, so i was out of luck on having t-mobile give me another one for less than $500.  i was really hoping that the goodness in people coupled with the adorable screensaver of my husband and babylove would lead to its safe return. 

yeah, no such luck.   

before i lost my phone, i was totally one of those people that you see glued to the phone at every free moment.  although it's never gotten quite this bad, i've definitely had a few close calls while walking. 

at first, i thought that not having my phone would be unbearable. no spontaneous checking of e-mails or facebook or checking in with friends.  but, for a few days, it actually was pretty nice to have an excuse to be unplugged from the world for a while. 

about a week into my involuntary blackberry vacation, i got to try out the hubby's iphone, which led to the realization that i hate touch screen phones.  at that time, my phone service was still on, so i could check my messages remotely and call people back if necessary.

the only times that i actually missed the blackberry were when i needed to google something right quick or when i wanted to "watch" a tv or sporting event with all of my facebook friends and giggle at their crazy comments. 

about 3 weeks after the phone disappeared, i finally decided to give up the ghost and order a new one.  after scouring the interwebs, i decided that ebay would be my best option.  being the impatient person that i am, i decided to pick the "buy now" option.  i was able to get a new (to me) blackberry in pretty good condition from one of the sellers for a week and a half of babylove's daycare tuition $320 with free shipping.  since i had the chance, i wanted to change it up so that i could maybe trick myself into thinking that the new phone was my idea.  i looked at other types of phones, but i'm pretty addicted to my crackberry, so i decided to get the same phone, but in white.

luckily, i had backed up all of the files on my old phone, including hospital pictures of my babylove from when she was born, and i wanted to make sure that i could just swap everything onto the new phone with a minimum of wahala.  i was able to escape phone number exchange hell since t-mobile has this niftly little automatic backup feature that came with our plan.

after the requisite scrubdown with clorox wipes (who knows where this phone came from / has been), i'm back in business and loving my new "whiteberry".

although i did miss a possible interview (grrr) by not responding quickly enough when the recruiter called, there were some positive things that came out of losing my phone.

i used to get a bunch of newsletters coming to the phone from various websites including about 5 baby-themed websites.  while i do like the convenience of reading up on babyloves weekly milestones, i realized that one of them, while pretty funny at times, was also a bit of a downer and was also one of the first things that i was reading each morning.  what a way to start the day with a dose of negativity without even realizing it!  needless to say, i unsubscribed to that mailing list.

i've also been able to scale back some of my addictive phone checking/texting.  i lost all of the hundred or so e-mails that had stacked up on the phone, and it was such a relief!  i've started being really vigilant about deleting e-mails once i am finished with them instead of letting them pile up on me. now i usually keep about 12-15 e-mails on the phone that i am following up on and i delete anything that's over one week old.

all's well that ends well, but i would have rather skipped the whole experience.  and i have one last message for whoever has my old phone: