I always knew he was clever but I never realized just how much. I had no clue that he was capable of such devious plotting. I concede that I wrote a few articles here at his expense. Okay, so I pulled his leg a few times publicly and enjoyed it too but for a spouse of 16 years, couldn’t he just take it in his stride? Was this action really necessary? Could you, in all honesty, justify it?
Let me be frank here. I didn’t see it coming at all. Not until it fell into my lap. I never once heard him say anything like ‘If I go down, I am taking you down with me.’ No such hints were dropped in my presence. He kept it under tight wraps till that day just so he could catch me off guard. According to him, it was a ‘surprise’ for me! Yeah, right…..like I am buying it. It wasn’t enough that he ended up an addict. He had to now go and make me one too.
Guess what my husband got me for my birthday last month? A Droid phone with 24/7 internet access, that’s what. How LOW can he get? Has he no shame?
Before this gift, I was having such a splendid time looking down my nose at the Droid phone addiction of the world at large, feeling superior about my self-control and strutting around with a smug smile plastered on my face. Riding high on a moral high horse was my specialty then. These days I can’t even crawl on the back of a moral pig.
Upon accepting his gift, I first gave him a look that was sure to wither a healthy young plant, then pulled up a chair and got busy. Obviously, there was no time to waste with a whole new world to explore at my fingertips. Several You Tube videos were beckoning me with the promise of entertainment, a built-in voice recorder was begging me to play with it and a digital camera was tempting me to click the ‘Kodak moments’ of life away. With these, also came a plethora of free applications that offered to keep track of my grocery lists, calorie intake, frequency of burping, pulse rate, dry cleaning schedule and cooking recipes. Oh, get this. I even found a free app to download a special pink calendar to keep track of my menstrual cycle with all its lovely details. Can’t believe it? Well, if I didn’t see it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it either. It is a miracle indeed.
If God had ever marked both this phone and the fruit from the tree of knowledge as forbidden in the Garden of Eden, guess what Adam and Eve would have chosen? Could you really blame them? Even Satan would bow low in submission to such devilry.
So now I have officially joined the ranks of the many whose lives are inexplicably tied to their phones. Do the phone companies realize that they are creating monsters around the world?
Yesterday evening, I looked up for a minute from my Droid phone only to find my husband and daughter sprawled over the couch across from me with their eyes locked onto their respective phones. Just weeks ago, stumbling upon a scene like this would have led me to launch one of my well-rehearsed lectures on the ill effects of technology addiction and ways to develop self-control. Now, all I can do is heave a sigh of resignation and get back to my game.
You have got to hand it to my husband. He really did kill 2 birds with one stone here. He got me (my friends insist) a great gift while at the same time, silencing my protests and lectures about his phone addiction effectively. Obviously the man is devious!
If you are sitting there mentally congratulating my husband on his clever mind, hear this too. Now that he has taken care of his problem (me)once and for all, guess what he got me for our anniversary last week? A pillow from Costco!
Makes me think that my Droid phone isn't so bad after all.
-Meena Sankaran
Showing posts with label cell phone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cell phone. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
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
• 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
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