Handphone kills...

your social life when it dies. This is the truth. Many are not aware how severe it could be without handphone. Of course life still goes on, but it is when people are trying to reach you or vice-versa is when this horrid massacare occurs.

I grew up in a world where handphone was not an issue until I entered first year of college. Everyone had one. Everyone was within reach. I was not. I was hard to get (anyway you want to see it). I was in a social blackhole that anyone with a phone could not reach me.

I am glad the way I am but not my friends. They wanted me to join the club badly. Everday they preach to me. Everyday they try their best to convert me. So finally, I gave in and after many months of saving, a handphone fell from the sky.

What I have is a Nokia3310. Lovely 5 year old technology when I first got it 2 years back. Not as colourful as most would imagine, but functional. The best thing is it makes phone calls and send messagers! To compliment it, a Digi prepaid starter pack worth RM20 at that time with the lowest call rates and sms too (now even cheaper with call rates being higher but sms is still dirt cheap unless you send it to other telcos).

Since then, the phone is with me everyday for all functions and events. It is one of the first thing I see when I wakeup (to hit the snooze button) and last thing I see before bedtime (set alarm) other than my Bible. It reminds me of birthdays and appointments, becomes my calculator, a tool for communicating and for protection. It is so rugged that you can drop it a few hundred times a year but it won't show you an error screen.

Or that was what I thought.

On the 372nd time I dropped the phone (two weeks back), the phone showed sign of defiance. It showed "low battery". Hmmm... pretty common. Seen it this before. So I charged the phone.

After the whole night later, it still did the same thing each time I turned on. It would not last more than 7.4 seconds before it shuts down with a "low battery" sign.

Finally, I have to declare my phone dead. OK, I would not say that my social life is dead. It has been dead for a long time now. By dropping the phone the 423rd time just made the living world harder to contact the dead.

All my living contact numbers are stored within a silly chip in the phone and the only way to retrieve any data is to have the phone stay switched on for at least 92 seconds.

To fix this tiny whinny little problem, I will need a miracle like getting a new phone (less likely) or replacing a battery (quite likely but not so soon) or remain out of reach for a long time.

Well, no frets. It is not the end of the world, there is always something called house phone, or the internet or snail-mail or signal through smoke and pegions and telepathy an...