Literally Lost Without My Cell Phone

It took ending up at the wrong restaurant in the wrong town after my daughter's 8^th grade graduation for me to realize just how dependent I've become on technology, in particular my cell phone.

It had been one of those crazy end-of-school June weeks every parent of school-age children knows all too well. The kind of week that makes getting work done a Herculean effort in the middle of all the school events marking endings and new beginnings in our kids' lives. The dinner celebration after the graduation was the one thing I thought I didn't have to think about since we were meeting a few families at a restaurant.

Only I could have sworn my friend told me the restaurant was in a plaza in the next town, about 20 minutes away. As we got through traffic to get there and realized it was not the right place, I pulled out my Treo to start calling friends. The battery went dead and the screen went blank. My husband had left his cell phone at home, and my charger was in my car, not his.

We went in search of a pay phone. Do you know how hard they are to find now even in a major public shopping center? One that has no cell phone accessories store? I finally did, dialed my friend's cell phone—the only number in the group I knew by heart, and got her voice message. (She didn't have her phone with her.) All of the other numbers we needed were either in my address book or my husband's.

A lot of things had to go wrong to make us horrendously late to the restaurant we were supposed to be at—one with the same name in the town we live in. Bad information from workers in restaurant #1, an uncharged phone, a forgotten one. But I quickly surmised that at another point in my life, I probably would have done more to make sure I was going to the right place before we left. SOP for a reporter, for goodness sakes! When most answers to questions are a phone call away and we always have our phones, you don't have to do the same kind of information gathering beforehand that was once required.

Anyway, about an hour into this Twilight Zone incident and a third check-in at the Italian restaurant I thought we were going to, we found out there is a sister restaurant in our town, in a very similar shopping center. The waiter called and found our party.

The best thing to come out of this? My teenager could have been merciless to her mother who nearly wrecked her post-graduation celebration. But she wasn't, even though she sensibly suggested we try the other shopping center in our town early on in our quest.

It's a new day, my Treo is fully charged, and I am chastened by my complete dependence on it.