No more Uncle Sam? Hallelujah!

I heard my husband walk through the front door calling my name over and over bursting with joy. One look at his face and I was ready to drop down on my knees and thank President Obama. Hallelujah! We got tax-exemption. I was sure of it. What else could have put that goofy grin on his face? Joy so pure and unadulterated on someone’s face can only mean a few things:

• You just received a notice in the mail from the IRS offering you full tax-exemption for life
• You struck oil in your backyard and now have to fight off the Sheikhs of the Middle East for your market share (or)
• You won a 50 million dollar lottery and Uncle Sam was kind enough to say ‘Never mind my share, you get to keep it all’.

Every year around this time in March, I find myself plagued by nightmares where I am running breathlessly through the dark and shady alleys of a city with Uncle Sam hard at my heels screaming hideously ‘Pay up, pay up, pay up’. I wake up drenched in sweat with eyes darting around in terror expecting to see an IRS agent cackling down at me with an audit notice flapping in his arm.

Obviously I wanted tax exemption more than anything else. Duh!

It turns out that that wasn’t the reason for the face-splitting grin on my husband’s face after all. His cell phone was dead. As in dead as a doornail.

Not a moment too soon according to my husband. It might sound callous to you but he had been waiting a long time for its death. Don’t get me wrong, he loved his cell phone. Such was his love that had I not stopped him, he would have called the governor and demanded a full State mourning and funeral befitting a fallen hero.

He did love his cell phone. It is just that he loved the new Droid phone on the market even more. All of Richmond knew that he had been secretly eyeing the Droid phone for a while now when he thought no one was looking. Did he really think that no one would notice those long sighs, vacant dreamy looks and the slight drool on the corner of his mouth? I knew and I sympathized with him. It must be really hard to be a gadget-junkie and not be able to play with the newest, shiniest and beautiful gadget out there.

All he needed was a valid excuse to go shopping for this new toy. The only excuse that didn’t bring truckloads of guilt with it was if the existing phone should die. And now finally it is dead and gone. Once I managed to calm him down and stop the hyperventilation, he was busy calling his friends to convey the good news after which he proceeded, in a frenzy, to check the websites for deals, do price comparisons and analyze the available accessories.

Today he is the proud owner of not one but two Droid phones thanks to the popular BOGOF sales technique. No happier man ever walked this earth.

If you are driving in our neighborhood and happen to catch a glimpse of another driver directing his Droid’s voice activated GPS to ‘Find Wal-Mart’ or ‘Find Chuck E Cheese’, be sure to honk and say hi to my husband.

-Meena Sankaran