I dropped my phone, and the result is that its microphone doesn’t work, but its speaker, and everything else, works perfectly fine. This means that when someone calls me, I can hear them speak, but they are not be able to hear me.
I don’t like talking on the phone very much, so I have been content with this arrangement for over two months now. I still answer most calls I receive and it is quite entertaining to hear people on the other end of the line, speaking uncertainly into my silence, saying my name two or three times, then waiting a few moments before hanging up.
I can still SMS, and so after I receive a call I will usually send a message explaining the situation. Some of my friends, perhaps a certain type, seem to enjoy the anomaly and continue to call me, freely speaking their information in quizzical tones. And seeing as most phone conversations are just exchanges of basic information, like telling someone you are running late, this works perfectly fine, and I can either message a reply if they have asked a question, or simply absorb their message without replying—if they are running five minutes late to meet me, then I just wait five more minutes.
To other friends with whom I am in less frequent contact, those who live interstate, for example, I might have explained the situation a number of times, but they will fail to remember, or will assume that after a couple of weeks I must have fixed my phone, or gotten a new one, as they would have done. With some friends, perhaps a certain type, I can sense a growing irritation.
I haven’t spoken to my mother very much since I dropped my phone. During a Skype conversation we had organised a few days in advance, she joked that perhaps I was only pretending my phone was broken in this improbable way so I can legitimately avoid calls from her, with phone calls from mothers supposed to be tiresome for adult children. But, in fact, it will be because of my family, who all live either interstate or overseas from me, when I eventually do get my phone fixed.
My brother does not have a computer, just a phone, so at the moment I can not either call him or Skype him, though we probably have a lot of news to share. I did speak to him once a couple of weeks ago when I had to call him from work because of an emergency. Afterwards, after the emergency had reached some resolution, I wanted to call him again to thank him for his help, and I saw that to send him an SMS would have been inadequate. On my way home from work that night I stopped at a public phone and called his mobile, and dropped about $10 worth of coins into the slot as we spoke for around 10 minutes.
I said before that I could still send SMS, but at the start of this week my credit for the month ran out and I am yet to buy more. At $29 it is fairly inexpensive, but after I ‘recharge’ I am told by the phone company that in fact I have $150 worth of credit, and it is this larger amount that seems to be going to waste considering I would usually send only one or two SMS each day. Over the past week if I received an SMS I would either wait until I eventually saw the person, as with my flatmates or someone I was going to meet, or send an email or Facebook message as my reply. Meanwhile, and quite understandably, I have been receiving steadily less SMS and phone calls over the past two months, but then in turn this makes buying credit seem even more unnecessary.
When I was speaking on Skype to my mother, she said slightly ironically that on Monday, for my birthday, she would send me ‘a text, or something.’ I know that my mother and father would like to call me for my birthday, as would my brother and my sister, and for this reason I thought that I should fix my phone by then.
As well as my immediate family, there is a handful of friends who live interstate who would probably call me for my birthday, but I can’t say this for certain because, when I think now, I didn’t necessarily call them on their most recent birthdays, and may have only sent them an SMS, or a short private or public message to their Facebook account. There are a couple of friends who will probably choose to send me an SMS, which seems somehow a bit more thoughtful or intimate than public Facebook messages at least, which sit there amongst so many others all alike. There are a few friends abroad, who I would love to celebrate with, but some of them don’t use Facebook, and I can’t be certain they’ll even know it is my birthday.
Most likely I will receive a number of nice messages on the wall of my Facebook page, but, again, I can’t really be sure about that either. Last year at this time I had temporarily deactivated my Facebook account, and for the past couple of years I have lived in a number different countries and cities, so it is possible that for many people, the habit having been disrupted, I will no longer be someone they would be sure to wish a happy birthday to. I know this has happened for me with many people.
Also, whenever I see on Facebook that it is someone’s birthday, and there are scores of messages, all the same, wishing them a happy birthday, I find there is frequently a slight formality to the postings, or a slightly laboured jokiness, which makes me think many of the people leaving messages are not actually very close to the person whose birthday it is. I don’t often post on people’s walls when it is their birthday, and, now that think of it, when I do it is usually someone who I like but I am not very close to, or someone who I have fond memories of having liked at some time in the past, or someone who I like but would like to know better, rather than a friend, who I would rather send a private message to, or SMS, or even call, or even visit.
