Jack, Jack, Jane, Jane, Jeremy, Jeremy...

This post is a warning to my good friend Nick who is about to leave for law school: Keep reading FCN, buddy, or we'll have even more stories about you.

The other day a personal friend and coworker (same person) was chatting on his phone with all the innocence of a twenty-two year old male. Posterity will never know the exact nature of this young man's conversation, but history can rest assured that the content was as pure as the driven snow. He was talking about nothing prurient, obscene or in any way degrading. The writer of Philippians would have loved to listen in on the conversation. My coworker wouldn't even have minded his mother eavesdropping; in fact, he probably even gave his mom the transcript after the fact.

At the conclusion of this pure conversation, my coworker shut his flip phone. It might now be appropriate to mention that my friend uses a Cingular brand telephone. While FCN hasn't been contacted by any phone company to do a product endorsement, we are not terribly big fans of the Cingular brand. We believe the company's national motto should be "more dropped calls than any other network" or "we charge for the static" or "fewer bars in more places." We believe AT&T, a picture of corporate responsibility, was corrupted by its merger with Cingular; we believe that the folks at Cingular regularly eavesdrop on conversations just for kicks. Incidentally, we also use Cingular as our cellular service provider, but that's another story.

Somehow, when my friend shut his flip phone, the top part of the phone (the one holding the earpiece and monitor) detached from the mouthpiece and keypad portion. The separation was soundless and quick, like a Las Vegas divorce, but it left the phone quite dead. My friend showed me the remains of the device that had once been the conveyor of so many pure ideas and warned me not to touch the exposed wires for fear of electrocution.

The next day at work, my coworker arrived with a phone that looked exactly like his old one, only it was connected again. I asked what had become of the old phone and my friend replied that he had "borrowed" his brother's and left his broken device in the trash. My friend told me how he was able to receive calls on the new phone because he had transferred his old SIM card to the new phone, leaving his brother's SIM card, I imagine, in the trash.

Then my friend made a comment that ruined my day and the next three hours of my life.

"The only bad thing is that I lost all of my telephone numbers; they were stored on the phone and went down with the ship," he said with a grim expression.

His words completed a circuit in my mind and a little light bulb went off. (That was a figurative attempt to match my friend's "down with the ship" line). What if my phone, a flip device lovingly named "black magic," suffered a severing fate similar to its cousin? What if I lost all the precious numbers of all the girls who'd never returned my calls?

I stopped what I was doing, putting the love letter I was writing aside, and opened up my phone.

When I first received Black Magic, I'd familiarized myself with all its meager features. I learned how to take pictures, send text messages and tinker with the operating system. I even suffered an embarrassing episode wherein I locked up my device and had to get a new SIM card from the Cingular store. I consider my adventures well paid tuition, because I knew exactly where to go with this problem.

I navigated quickly to the settings menu and selected the "Address Book" menu. There, I asked that all my contacts, currently saved to the phone, be moved to the SIM card. It took several minutes (more of a reflection on the quality of the phone than the number of friends I have) but eventually my entire address book was on the SIM card.

That's when it hit me like a head-on collision with a locomotive: What if my SIM card were to become corrupted?

SIM card corruption is genetic in my family. My father has had two cards go Nixon on him and I already wrote about my experiences. The threat of SIM corruption is so real that I always set my phone down gently and sometimes wrap bubble wrap around it before I slide it into my pocket. This practice never fails to get stares from my friends, but I take consolation in knowing that my equipment will last longer; you can never be too sure about SIM cards, and I'm pretty big on protection.

To answer this fear of SIM corruption, I copied my entire address book back to the phone, while keeping the originals entries intact. Then, satisfied that my addresses were protected, I opened my contacts list to examine the results. What I saw there turned my satisfied glee into tepid concern:

Jack

Jack

Jane

Jane

Jeremy

Jeremy

The imbecilic phone had duplicated all my contacts! Now I had to thumb through twice the number of contacts to get to the name I wanted to dial. This inconvenience would be a serious crimp to my Cool, Calm and Collected approach to phone use. I didn't want to be another converse clad nerd who has to spend several minutes with his keypad to call his best friend. I liked the ease of push button calling and glide-like navigation through names; I felt that by ruining my phone, I had ruined my life, or at least my social life.

I ended up fixing the address book by tediously removing the duplicative listings on the way up to a friends' house in the mountains. Driving while using my phone's keypad through bubble wrap was an experience that, while comic, is not fondly remembered.