Over the last two weeks I have been scrambling around trying to arrange for contractors to make bids on my home renovations and repairs, coordinating repair people to arrive with claims adjustors, making appointments to meet with flooring guys and repair guys and fix it upper guys and so on and so on and so forth. I have been to six million different floor shops selecting every sample imaginable. I've been to a hundred and fifty thousand granite countertop places, picking out giant slabs of rock. I have browsed through seventeen magazine quality brochures on kitchen cabinets, with pictures of kitchens three times larger than any kitchen in a seventeen mile radius of my house, magazines that mock my puny kitchen's inadequacies. I have searched high and low on Pinterest for ideas for backsplashes for my puny inadequate kitchen and my three bathrooms. I have paint swatches and tile finishes and tape measurements and a million different business cards from a million different people who all want my business, who all want to give me advice, and who all contradict one another.
All I really wanted was to repair the water damage under my dishwasher. I wasn't looking for a massive home remodel and house renovation. Truly. I wasn't. In my dreams, house remodel planning and home renovation planning is a joyful and pleasant experience. Like planning a wedding. Using the photos from the magazines, you plan out your dream wedding which, using their figures, will end up costing more than my current house does. And then you start paring things down and compromising your dreams until you've developed a fairly decent plan that you can almost afford, and you spend the next six months convincing yourself it really *is* the wedding of your dreams.
But my house remodel / house renovation planning hasn't been anything like that. It has not been dreamy. It hasn't been joyful. It hasn't been slow and calculated, allowing me the time to savor the possibilities, and pour over the choices until the best of the options makes itself clear. Instead, it's been a series of panicked phone calls and urgent messages, and bids that have been rushed so that the water can stop destroying my floor and causing more damage.
I am hoping beyond hope that when the last of the bids arrives, I will have selected my new flooring, to coordinate with my freshly painted walls and my current furniture. I will have chosen the best countertops and a lovely coordinating backsplash with a creative and catchy design that is fairly easy to slap up there on the wall. I will have stunning new kitchen cabinets, and new floors, and all the lovely things we wanted to have done with heaps and gobs and hoards of money leftover from our house refi. Bwaa haa haa haa!
And it actually occurred to me yesterday as my ears grew sore as the day grew long, and the quotes started coming in that I had spent so much time on my smart phone using it as a *gasp!* telephone, that I hadn't had time to check my emails, or surf the web, or take pictures, or update my calendar, or pin a new design. And I won't even mention my neglect to my Words with Friends friends, or my Candy Crush pals.
For the first time in three years since I've had a smart phone, I actually used my phone as a TELEPHONE, and not as a portable computer.
This realization seemed like such an odd and strange concept to me. I rarely, if ever, make phone calls. I share the smallest plan of minutes between all my family members, and every month we have so many minutes leftover that we roll them over to the next month. We've been rolling them over for so long that now we end up "losing" our unused minutes from the year before because there are just so many of them lolling about in cyberspace, and they "expire" at the end of a year. My telephone icon on my iPhone screen isn't even at the bottom of my "frequently used apps." That's how rarely I use my phone as a phone. And if I do call someone, I usually only call people when I'm driving. And then, my car syncs everything up with its bluetooth, and so I use the steering wheel on my car and the car's touch screen system to make my phone calls, and I don't really ever use the touch screen app on my iPhone.
And if I don't use my phone as a phone, why do I call it my "phone?" Why not call it my "life organizer," or my "handheld computer?" or my "please dear God don't ever let me lose this thing, and if I do, *please* let me have left it fully charged and with the ringer turned on so that I can find it again."
I grew up in the days where the kitchen telephone had a cord so long you could wrap it around your body three times and still have plenty of cord left over to walk into the tv room and slouch on the couch. Or you could take the phone from upstairs and stretch the cord out through the hallway and into your bedroom, just so you could have a wee bit of privacy and gossip with your friends about who liked whom. We'd spend hours upon hours on the phone living the real life version of a Jerry Seinfeld episode, talking about nothing to the people who we loved the most. It never once occurred to me, when I was a child, that a telephone could also act as my camera, my calendar, my yellow pages, my library, my dictionary, my gaming entertainment, or act as a book, a radio or a portable movie theater!!
Today, after the thirty sixth phone call in three hours (36 phone calls!!), I finally sat down and had to email a few photos from my iPhone to my contractor's supply house to help the design process of the new kitchen cupboards. Then I used my phone's calendar to schedule out a doctor's appointment for one of my kiddos. Maybe this afternoon I'll have a chance to check my email or catch up on a Words with Friends game, hoping *this time* to beat my über smart sister-in-law. (Ha, fat chance.) But for today, the telephone portion of my smart phone won out once again.
Gee, maybe this month I'll actually come close to using half of my allotted monthly minutes!!
* * * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment