How To Give Oneself A Heart Attack1

Go to your hockey game and, when you get to the arena, discover that your beloved Palm Treo Smartphone is not in your jacket pocket. Look around your co-op car, but don't find it, and tell yourself, "oh, I'm sure it fell out of my pocket when I had my jacket on the couch. It's clearly just sitting on my couch." Arrive home, 5 hours later and don't find your beloved Palm Treo Smartphone sitting on the couch. In fact, don't find it *anywhere* in your apartment. Use Skype to call it, expecting to hear your beloved ringtone on your beloved Palm Treo Smartphone, but don't hear it. Keep Skyping it, and think you can vaguely hear it, but then decide you are just imagining it and feel the sinking realization that you may have lost your beloved Palm Treo Smartphone for good. Because it clearly is not in the apartment. Run back out to your co-op car, and search every inch of it, three times, but don't find your beloved Palm Treo Smartphone. Your $550 beloved Palm Treo Smartphone that you definitely do not have enough money to replace. Try Skyping it and running outside to see if you can hear it ringing in your co-op car and swear that you could hear it, very faintly as you run outside and curse your low number of rings before the voicemail picks up. Find a friend who is awake at 12:30 am and Skype them, telling them they have to keep calling your cell phone until you find it. Realize at this point that you have now lost the key to your co-op car at some point during your frantic running around looking for your phone. Run outside, just to see if you can hear it coming from inside the car, even if you now have no key to get into said car. Mercifully, mercifully, hear your beloved ringtone on your beloved Palm Treo Smartphone, run to the car, but then realize that the sound is not coming from inside the car. Look around in the darkness, listening.... where is that beloved ringtone coming from? Realize in horror that it's coming from across the road, where you had the car parked before you went to hockey, now some 5.5 hours hours ago. Find your beloved Palm Treo Smartphone sitting in a pile of wet leaves on the side of the road, where it must have been sitting for almost 6 hours! Where, mercifully, miraculously, inexplicably it was neither stolen nor run over². Pick it up, caress it, tell it you are so, so sorry and you'll never let it fall out of your pocket again.

Now face another half hour of searching for the co-op car key. Which it turns out you dropped on the front lawn, but this somehow requires you go over the lawn with a fine toothed comb like six times before it turns up. Finally, mercifully be able to return your co-op car at 1 a.m., face the walk home from dropping off the car knowing you still need a post-hockey shower and you have to get up at 6 a.m. *Sigh*.

I'm pretty sure this experience will increase my phone- and car key-losing paranoia, which was already at what I believed to be an unreasonable level, exponentially.

¹Alternative titles for this blog posting include, "Also Not To Be Trusted With Cell Phones," and "Truly the Dropper of All Things Valuable."
²The one benefit of living in the sleepy area of the city, where all the elderly people live. No one is outside past 5 pm and so no one can hear your cell phone ringing and steal it. If I'd dropped a $550 gadget on the side of the road in downtown Vancouver or Kits, it would have been gone within seconds!