Fish in My Hair

A few weeks ago, I decided it was time to upgrade my cell phone and our service plan. The kids were complaining that my basic little phone didn’t perform any of the most necessary cell phone functions, like taking pictures, text messaging, or having an obnoxious ring tone. And I thought we needed a few more minutes on our plan. As it was, we had 400 minutes per month, which meant that my kids could call me 400 times so I could answer the same questions every time:

1) “Where are you?” and, 2) “When will you be home?”

Additionally, on odd-numbered days they call to remind me that we are out of milk, socks, and underwear, and on even-numbered days, two of them take turns calling every 10 minutes to rat each other out. I should also note that I receive the majority of my phone calls before I have even pulled out of the driveway.

So I decided to upgrade our service plan to 600 minutes, thinking I’d have a nice cushion of minutes to use to call people who want to talk about something other than boogers and who ate the last Klondike bar. But it’s not working out the way I planned. It seems that Princess BunHead and her friend have decided they need at least an hour a day to discuss what they instant messaged about that morning, and then another hour to discuss what they emailed about that afternoon. Hello? Have you people ever heard of the postal service? Would it kill you to use a pen?

Well, at least I have a nice, new phone. I picked out a pink Razor phone, even though my daughter, FashionBug, advised against it. She says it’s going to clash with my outfit every time I wear red. Color aside, my new phone has all kinds of cool features like a camera, which has allowed me to be the proud owner of 18 pictures of my son’s nostrils and five photos of the inside of my purse. I’ve also successfully but mistakenly text-messaged a snake farmer in India and a German brewery.

To make things even more interesting, yesterday I purchased a wireless headset (in matching pink, of course). This allows me to walk around in public looking like I am carrying on a very important business call, when in fact I am just disconnecting all my calls because I can’t see the dang thing to push the right buttons, and then muttering to myself about my apparent technological ineptitude.

So don’t call me for a couple of days. My phone’s going to be tied up while I figure out how to program it to answer, “TC is not available right now. If you would like to leave a message that she will never receive because she has forgotten her voice mail password, press 1. If you would like to make a donation toward her cell phone bill, press 2. If you would like to annoy her, just press a bunch of buttons in random order. If this is an emergency, please hang up and send a postcard. Thank you.”