Yesterday, my cell phone went on the fritz. It locked up, it started speaking commands out of nowhere, and it wouldn’t shut down or shut up. The most disconcerting thing about the whole situation was how panicked I felt. My phone is about a year old, a new model and I really wasn’t up for getting a replacement phone. I got my husband involved with the whole fiasco and we looked up help sites and barked out orders to each other, grabbing the phone back and forth, getting grumpier by the second, with the situation and with each other. We seemed to be stuck in a quagmire, where even the old trusty “turn it on/turn it off trick” wasn’t going to work because the phone refused to turn off. We called our cell coverage carrier, the maker of the cell device, and the insurance coverage company of our cell phones, with no one having any really good advice to give to us. We spent a couple hours on this craziness, spiraling into a funnel of frustration. When I finally threw my hands up in the air and started the insurance claim, my 18-year-old son arrived home from the gym. He saw the frustration on his parents’ faces, the clumps of hair lying on the ground from being pulled out of our heads and he said, “Mom, could I just see your phone for a second? Could I just take a look at it?”
As futile as I knew that would be, I tossed him the phone so that I could get back to concentrating on my insurance claim. Five minutes later, he had it fixed, back to new. I didn’t even bother to ask him how he did it. I was too exhausted and relieved. I think my son’s generation and the ones coming up behind him have special abilities programmed inside of their heads, tied to technology, that my simpler model, retro-mind just doesn’t have programmed into it. And that’s okay. I know where to find my kids when I need help.