I may be a misanthrope, but occasionally, I notice when my iPhone goes missing.

The other day, I realized it had been hours since I’d thought of it or heard it buzz. I went hunting.

Green tote bag, where had I put it? Ah, yes. Got home, plopped said bag on couch. There it was.

I reached inside and came out with a wad of soaking wet tissues and receipts.

This was bad. This was very, very bad. What the hell?

I dug frantically for my phone and hit plastic: a mostly empty water bottle. Cap, still on. Yet somehow it had leaked. Effity eff eff.

I fished and came up with my phone, finally. It looked fine, just a few drops of water beading on its orange plastic case. I pushed the button. Nothing.

I pushed again. Uh-uh.

Maybe I turned it off, I thought. I pressed the top button, the one that generally is not part of my life.

A BIG EXTRA-LOUD NOTHING.

In total denial, I decided it simply needed to be charged. And so (feel the stoooooopid) I plugged the sucker into its charging cord.

I would like to introduce you to a very, very bad noise:

Zzzzcrcrcrzzzkkzzz.

Big effity eff eff. I killed it. Oh, I tried the iLazarus trick, plopping it in dry rice for a few days. But my iPhone did not iRise from the iDead. It was toast, and I was unreachable.

I was officially unreachable, a nice sanctioned unreachable, for 72 hours.

And it wasn’t half bad. I kind of miss the days when, if you were out, you were out. If you weren’t home to answer the phone drilled into the wall, well, no harm, no foul. It was…peaceful, then.

At the Apple store, they offered me a replacement model for $150. Fair enough. (An upgrade to that vixen call girl Siri would have run me $600.)

And the minute the new one was in my hands, and texts stuck in the pipeline started buzzing through, I felt a pang of something like regret. It was a shock to the system to be without it, but it was a shock to be back on the grid, too.

I tell my girls that I used to write my papers for college in a communal computer lab, and that sometimes, we had to wait for hours to snag a terminal. They stare at me in open-mouthed disbelief when I explain that there was no internet then, not as they know it, at least, and that most families we knew owned a set of encyclopedias. Work stayed at work. Home was home. You were either in the right place at the right time, or you weren’t. You either saw the movie in the theatre, or you didn’t see it at all. When you went on vacation, you went on vacation, and no one heard from you for a week. And most people never saw your photos.

I’m grateful for technology. It’s allowed me to work and love from a distance, and that’s a great thing.

But there’s something to be said about being taking a break to be wherever you are, with whomever you’re with, in real time, in the real world…without getting pinged.

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