Listen to me.

It wasn't my fault.

It just freaking happened!!

I had nothing to do
with it!

Sometimes I really
think that the cards are stacked against me, especially when it comes
to most things electronic.

Okay. So, what
happened?

Well, when I go to
bed at night, I always take a glass of water with me.

Sometimes I wake up
in the middle of the night dying of thirst. So I always take a full
glass with me and put it on the nightstand next to my bed.

I also put my
cellphone on the same nightstand, because I use the Alarm Clock
feature on it to wake me up in the morning.

Now, five days out
of the week, I wake up at 4:20 a.m. I get up that freaking early
because I leave for work at 6:15 a.m., and I like to go out on a
three-mile run with my dog Fritz before or just at sunrise. Then I
feed the horses and the pony, take a shower, meditate, and head out
the door for work.

Well, on this
particular morning, that didn't happen.

I was awaken by my
female German Shepherd, Dixie.(Dixie is pushing eleven years old, and
she has little to no bladder control any longer.) On the morning in
question, Dixie licked my face and proceeded to dance around the
bedroom and squealing, with her much-in-need-of-clipping toenails
clicking sharply on the bare wood floors. If she could have crossed
her legs, I believe she would have done just that.

I sat up in bed,
and let my head clear out a bit.

What the hell time is it,
I wondered. As I fumbled for my glasses, Dixie looked at me and said,
“Now, Dad! Damn it! This isn't a freaking request! Get your dead ass out of that bed and let me
out!!!!!!!!!!!!”
(I heard her say that just as clear as a bell.)

So, I bounded out of bed and stumbled blindly down the stairs. When I
opened the front door, Dixie carreened past me like she was shot out
of a cannon - just one, sleek, black-and-tan blur!

When I got back into the bedroom, I grabbed the clock and squinted at
it.

5 a.m.

5 a.m.????

Shit! What the hell happened to my freaking cellphone alarm clock?

I grabbed the phone off of my nightstand.

Now,
here's something strange. The phone is wet!

WTF??????

The phone was dead. Not just dead, but DEEEEEAAAaaaaaaaAADDDDD!

I hit the power button a dozen times.

Que Nada.

I woke Mary up.

She told me to take her hairdryer to it and then seal it in a baggie
with two cups of uncooked rice.

“And leave it for the day!” She said in her Teacher Voice. “Don't
keep taking it out to check on it!”

I was almost offended by her tone, but, deep in my heart, I knew that
she was right. Left to my own devices, I would be checking the thing
every three minutes.

So, I fed the animals, showered, meditated . . . and left the bag of
rice home when I took off for work.

I thought about the phone all day long.

How did it happen? The only thing that I could figure was the damned
cat was to blame. In the past, I've caught Smokey drinking out of my
water glass.And now I wondered if the stupid little creature got
thirsty during the night, and thinking that she is ALWAYS entitled to
the freshest of the water sources, took the opportunity to drink out
my glass, tipping the cup slightly, and spilling some of its contents
onto my phone.

Dumb little ass!

Sometimes I really hate her.

If only she wasn't so damned cute and lovable.

Then I thought, Could stupid Smokey really spill that much water
out of the glass without tipping the glass over? I didn't think
so. But what other explanation was there, other than admitting that I might have knocked the glass in my sleep and made the water slosh
over the rim and onto the phone?

Nope!
It was the damned cat. No matter how improbable the scenerio
appeared, it was the damned cat.

I have had issues with cellphones and water before, and none of them
ended up good. So I knew that the phone, and all of the phone
numbers, pictures and appointment schedules it contained, were now
just fond memories.

First thing I did when I got to work was alert all my friends by
email about what had happened, and I asked them to send me their
phone numbers so that I could put them on the new phone I was going
to get.

Then, I spent the rest of the day wondering if the old phone was
going to work when I got home.

I thought of all of those pictures of my grandchildren, of my
animals, of beautiful nature scenes that would be gone if the phone
was dead.

I thought of all the time involved with punching in ALL OF THOSE
PHONE NUMBERS that would have to take place if the phone was dead.

I tried to remember all of the dates and times of my appointments
that would be inaccessable to me if the phone was dead.

AND GUESS WHAT??????!!!!!!!!!!

When I GOT HOME
. . .

the phone was dead.

Earlier
in the day, I had called Mary Ellen (from the archaic land line phone
on my desk at work) and said, “If the phone is dead when I get
home, I'll just run all
the way down to the
phone store and get a new one...( I was hoping that she would hear
the unspoken appendage to that sentence, which was, “Even though I
work so hard all day long
earning money for us while
you, being retired, have all
of this free time on your hands and could easily do the task for
me during the day so
that I could get some well-deserved
rest when I come home.”

She didn't.

She simply replied with a cheery, “All right, My Honey! See you
when get back with your new phone! I love you!”

Women
are so stupid and unperceptive sometimes?

I then gave her my “the cat did it” explanation.

Her
response was, “Really? That's interesting!”
(Translation: “Jim, you're full of shit!”)

So, anyway, as exhausted as I was when I came home from work, I
grabbed the old phone out of the rice bag, tried one last time to
turn it on, realized that it had really gone the way of the dinosaurs
and the Do-do Bird, and headed off to the phone store.

When I got there, some twelve-year-old clerk with acne on his cheeks
and a huge Dennis The Menace cowlick came up to me with a “Can I
help you, sir?”

I handed him my phone and asked, “It got soaked. Can you save it?”

He examined it like a jeweler would a diamond, and then he sighed,
grimaced and shook his head.

“What about all the data stored on it? Isn't there a chip or a card
or something that you can remove and download the info onto another
phone?”

He asked me if the phone had been equipped with a “data backup
program.”

“How the hell should I know,” was my learned response. “What
the hell is that, an Old Fart App?”

He smiled and replied, “Actually more college students than older
folks wreck their phones with liquids. Usually beer. What happened
with this one?”

I explained to him about the cat and the glass.

He raised his eyebrows and said, “Really? That's interesting!”

Fuck him.

He then fooled around with the new phone for a moment and said, “I
just activated the data backup program in this for you so that you
can retrieve all of your data the next time the cat acts up.”

So I got the phone for twenty-one dollars and a two-year extension on
my Verizon Wireless contract, and I've spent the last two days
manually inputting phone numbers and other valuable and needed info.

I really miss the pics though.