In my mad rush to get to the airport for Las Vegas, someone bumped into me pretty hard with their luggage. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I got out of the subway to catch the AirTrain. My phone looked like this:

I immediately recognized it as a cracked LCD, but attempted to turn the phone on and off repeatedly in hopes that it was just some kind of windows mobile crash. It wasn’t, obviously. That’s also when I realized how dependent I am on my cell phone. I only have a handful of phone numbers memorized and they were going to be of no use to me in Vegas. Luckily for me, the call history feature on this phone is laid out pretty well and though I did call some random people a million times, I managed to get a hold of Demanda and crew.

Getting a hold of them wasn’t enough though. I needed a phone and I needed it now. I wasn’t going to suffer all weekend without it. I need my entertainment box any moment I have more than ten seconds of idle time. I need to check bloglines and email and sports scores (Yeah, I can’t explain that one either) and sometimes I even look up directions. So on Friday I was on a mission to get a new phone. $70 in cabs and $375 later, I had a new phone, and an insane hatred of Las Vegas traffic. Motherfuck it couldn’t be worse. The one shining moment in the trip was finding a Zappos outlet store in Vegas (which happens to be the new headquarters for Zappos).

But I remember when I used to have everyone’s phone numbers memorized. In fact, I still remember the work phone numbers of the majority of my coworkers from NI. Unfortunately that too would do me little good, since a lot of them no longer work at the company. Now instead of phone numbers, I have the latest episode of I Love New York stuck in my mind. That’s a good trade-off.

To mitigate this problem I think I need to use the old buddy system. So, I need a phone buddy. We’ll exchange complete phone lists and memorize each others phone numbers. That way should my phone ever break again I can get all the important numbers by calling one person. Either that or I’ll just have to reallocate some TV watching memory.  Yeah, sign ups for phone buddy start…now.