Sometimes, things happen so quickly that you can still taste how life felt before those things happened. Of course, most large things in life happen gradually, but sometimes things are sudden and life is changed forever – a harsh word said in anger, something overheard at work, a rogue receipt found in a pair of trousers.
What I’m about to write about is nothing like those, of course, but it was one of those moments.
Essentially, I think I just did myself out of £200 in less than a second.
I was sitting on the sofa, keeping an eye on my work emails and thinking I don’t have anything to blog about today, and I shifted as I reached forward for my tea. My phone fell off the sofa. My phone is in a study case and it falls off things a lot – I always have it with me and I am quite a clumsy person.
But as I saw it, face down, on our wooden floor, I just knew I had cracked the screen. I knew this to such an extent that I actually went and freaked out in the hall before coming back and picking it up. It’s completely cracked.
I know, I know, what a first world problem. My phone still works. And also, my life is not changed forever.
But here’s the thing. I was just saying yesterday that my contract is up in 6 weeks. I’ve done the difficult thing: waiting two years so I could upgrade for free, and could make a tidy £300 profit selling my phone on.
All that money evaporated in the second it took for my phone to fall off the sofa. I could still sell it, but probably for only around £100, and it would cost £150 to fix it, so there is little point. I don’t need the money, but in light of paying off my debt and bringing our holiday forward to June, I could have really used it.
(Oh, yes, we have delayed our long-haul trip to California to next spring, because we can’t really justify spending c£1,500 on a holiday right now. That was slightly heart breaking because holidays are really our top priority. So we decided to go somewhere not long-haul over the summer and then, the summer is filled with sport and school children, so we are going to try to go at the end of June.)
I have been thinking over the past few days, though, that I’m a lot happier when I’m not on the internet all the time. I know, I know, so far so obvious. What I mean is, I love the internet, but I prefer it when I treat it as one of my hobbies, rather that it filling all of the gaps between my hobbies. I read somewhere that willpower is like a muscle, and the more you exercise it the stronger it gets. So while I was feeling a little strange earlier in the week when I was watching TV in the evenings without checking the internet at all, now I feel, well, liberated.
I was already getting mildly stressed because I was due to upgrade my iPhone the day before my holiday and the process always takes longer than you’d think. I was also stressed on our last holiday to Bordeaux because I felt like I wanted to be completely without my phone in order to relax but couldn’t as I used it as a camera.
Now, my phone is caput, and I wouldn’t want to take something on holiday which has a screen made of broken glass. So I think I’ll probably leave it at home and take my perfectly good camera instead.
I hate the phrase ‘everything happens for a reason’, and I don’t think it’s true, but, you know.
“Hi,” MindReader says to me, by my side suddenly in Tesco. I step away, embarrassed to have been caught looking at an article in a newspaper about Madeleine McCann.
