I guess they really do make ‘em like they used to

I haven’t yet heard back from my editor about my piece in tomorrow’s Daily, a fact that I can’t help but feel is morbidly ominous. I can imagine several horrifying scenarios: she’s not running it at all, in which case she is afraid of my quivering temper; she’s made massive cuts, in which case she wants to wait to tell me until there’s nothing I can do; she is actually a terrible lizard creature from the depth of the earth, cleverly taking human form for some nefarious scheme, in which case we’re all doomed – Melissa is a resourceful woman. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow. In any case, here’s the article for you, the Loyal Eleven, a day early.

Appropriately enough, as I was walking to work today I dropped my cell phone in a puddle. It’s cold outside and so my hands were less dexterous than normal – or I’m a clumsy buffoon – and as I tried to dial a number the phone’s sleek body slid from my grasp, and I juggled it for agonizing seconds before it finally fell smack into a stagnant pool of rainwater. It was probably fully submerged for a little over a second, but it never lost power and seemed to work fine. I took it apart and dried everything just to be sure, and the only defect I noticed was that for a while the volume seemed to be stuck on the lowest setting, so I had to tell Kelly to yell in order to hear her. It’s fine now.

People treat their electronic devices like they were handling newborn kittens, but by and large these gadgets are a lot tougher than people give them credit for. I’ve heard lots of stories of people dropping their Gameboys into toilets or out of three-story windows, spilling coffee onto their PDA’s, or generally beating the hell out of their CD players, all of which survived the licking and kept on ticking. My own Discman has suffered some pretty nasty falls and hasn’t broken yet, and while today was the first time my cell phone has gotten the puddle treatment, its scratched and scuffed case is a testament to its hardiness.

I still have half of The House of Mirth to read tonight, and my enthusiasm for the literature has flagged noticeably. If I have to read one more three-page-long description of fancy dresses and salmon mousses at a dinner party, I swear those three pages get burned. I mean it, Edith.