No more slave

For me there are two types of mobile phones - email phones and 'other phones'. For several years I have been highly addicted to email phones. Even few hours of outage at blackberry would make me sound like a lost man. When my blackberry conked off last week, I could sense withdrwal symptoms. Was not able to concentrate on work at hand. Wifey started complaining that I was paying even less attention to her!

Displaying a sense of urgency alien to me, I figured out where to get it fixed. I went over to Airtel's Blackberry Support centre. The young engineer from Wipro had a quick look at the phone. For some reason he refused to believe that it was my phone!!! In two different ways he asked me if I indeed was the user of the phone.
And then came the dampner. "It will have to be sent to Bangalore. Will cost you 5600 bucks, if they are able to fix it. Else you will get your phone and money back. It will take at least 10 days, and you will lose all your data either ways", said the engineer in one breath.

Everything was against me. It would cost good deal of money. It would take a lot of time. I would lose all data and in the end it may not get fixed! I came back without submitting my phone for repair.

I took out my old 'other phone' - the one without email. It was not getting charged. I took it to Sony Ericsson service center. They were nice enough to fix it within few hours at a nominal price.

So here am I. Struggling to transfer my contacts from my email phone to 'other phone' - manually! But I am getting used to a non instant life. And contrary to my belief nothing has changed for the world. Everything is going on as usual. There are no delays anywhere, nobody is dying coz of lag in my replies to emails.

And to top it all, kids are happier that I am actually listening to them. Wifey is also cool that she has more of my mindspace, at least when we are together. And she has her moments too - "Is everything ok? Nah, I was just thinking since you are not checking the mails, Obama would be wondering what to do with GM?"

I feel good that I am no more slave to my mobile. Hope it remains this way for long.