“Hello sir, welcome to Verizon. What can I help you with today?”
With supreme confidence and an air of annoyance, I showed the clerk my poor Blackberry. Nothing was cracked or broken on the outside, but the screen was totally unreadable and pixelated beyond belief. I could still receive and make calls, but I had no idea who was trying to reach me and there was no way to figure out who the hell I was calling. Needless to say retrieving my e-mail and looking at text messages was not an option.
“There’s something wrong with my Blackberry, I either need this fixed or I need a new phone,” I told him matter-of-factly.
“Oh wow,” the clerk said. “Well it’s pretty clear the screen is broken on the inside. How did this happen?”
Picture, if you will, the inside of the Daddy Files mansion about three hours earlier. The camera cuts to an out-of-shape 31-year-old writer. Irish music is blaring from an iPod and the father approaches his toddler son, who is clutching the dad’s cell phone in his strong little hands.
“Uppy, uppy, dance!” the excited boy screams. Which is toddler for “Pick me up and dance, bitch!”
The father complies. The dad takes the cell phone in one hand and the boy in the other. Then they start rocking out around the living room. They’re jumping, spinning, laughing, and prancing around the room. The boy’s giggles escalate and the dad’s smile widens. Just as the bodhran starts to crescendo and the son reaches a fever pitch, the boy shouts “More, more!”
The dad—although out of breath—kicks it up a notch. Jumping a little higher, moving a little faster, the dad really starts to get into it. As the song ends, he launches into a whirlwind spin in the middle of the living room. Spinning and spinning, faster and faster, until…
The cell phone slips out of his hand in the middle of his sweet cyclonic dance moves. It rockets straight into the far wall.
Father and son stop spinning, each one looking at each other with jaws open and at the same time, they exclaim “Uh oh.”
“Sir?” says the clerk, snapping me back into reality. “How did this happen?”
“Damned if I know, I woke up and it was like this. You guys really need to make better phones.”
—Photo Glen Bowman/Flickr
Great story! Honestly, though, if a phone can’t handle a bit of Whirling Dervishness followed by a flight across a room and a good smash on the floor, I’d take it back anyway. The crap we’re sold these days…
Thanks for the great read!
Had a similar experience … only mine involved my 2YO hurling my Droid across the room, sliding across the wood floor to ricochet into the baseboard and shatter the screen. When I went to the Verizon store, clerk asked what happened and I said I wasn’t too sure, it had been in my pocket. My boy chimed in with … “No Daddy. I throw it.” Nice timing buddy.
Shame to break a phone, but hey, talk about going out in a blaze of glory. Two phones back, my then 2 yo son took my silver clam shell style phone and tried to use it for a boat in the dog’s water dish. We were both disappointed with the end result.