Freak out

Those of you who know me well, know that I'm not exactly a technowizard. And you know that I never learned to master the cell phone beyond occassionally making a successful call. I'm still at about a 90% success rate on that. I make so few that sometimes I hit the buttons wrong and it doesn't go through.

The one thing I thought I had down though was charging it. I've learned to recognize the low battery distress call. I no longer search the house to try to figure out what that beeping noise is and it's easy enough to plug in the little cord to make it happy again. So I go to charge it up yesterday morning and I plug in as usual and it doesn't make the happy beep. And it doesn't light up.

Now I'm not a total technodope, so I tried another outlet, in case it was just that the one I always use maybe stopped working. I've been having some breakdowns here lately and that does happen. So I plug it into the outlet across the counter from that one and still nothing. Then I freaked out. I thought I had broken the phone somehow or maybe the battery went bad. No idea what to do about that.

I wandered around the apartment for good ten minutes wondering if you have to change your phone number when you buy a new one. I don't know this because this one was given to me and I'm on their service as a part of a family plan. I don't even know where to buy a new cell phone. I was hoping it wasn't the phone store at the mall.

Finally it occurs to try an outlet in a different room. The phone trills its approval and everything lights up as it should. Massive relief. Of course, I'm still left to deal with the broken outlets but that's a maintainence problem that could wait. I have way more outlets than I ever use in this kitchen.

When it got dark I noticed that one of the broken outlets had a tiny red light embedded in the cover. Only because it was lit up. It wasn't until then I noticed it also had a reset button. Needless to say, everything is working now. I'm glad I didn't call the office right away. I would have felt pretty silly about that.