These little computers in our hands are specifically designed to suck you in. I remember when they first were announced I said I would never want to merge my phone with my iPod. I felt like it was putting all my eggs in one basket. What would happen if you lost it?

Yet here I am many years later using my phone to do…literally everything. If I cannot do it from my phone, I am likely not doing it.

Pay a bill?  Get my phone. 
Order food?  Open the app?
What’s the weather?  Let me check. 
Who won the game?  I have the score right here. 

Getting out my actual computer, which is literally a fraction of the size of the computers of yore, seems like a gargantuan feat. Getting out of my bed to do it is impossible. It’s just not happening. Especially if it is after 7:30 pm.

How did this one piece of glass and microchips become the single most important thing I own? This past summer I lost my phone. Somewhere between my car and my house. I was in the garage. It seems like that couldn’t happen and yet somehow it did. The phone was in airplane mode. I scoured my car. I dumped out my purse. Twice. I cried tears of frustration. It had vanished.

I had no other choice but to go buy a new phone the next day. Luckily I was rocking an 8+ while the 13 had already been released. it was time anyway. But still the need of having to do it immediately sent me into a panic. I completed my transaction and I was relieved to see my data downloading onto my new device. I went on my merry way.

About a mile from AT&T, I heard my new phone ringing a familiar yet incorrect ringtone. It was alarm tone. Yet I hadn’t set an alarm yet. Did my alarms carry over to my new phone? And why was it going off at 1:43 in the afternoon? I pulled over and pulled my new phone from my purse. It was not alarming or ringing. My purse was.

How could that be? I dumped it out twice. I checked every pocket and zipper. I dumped it again. Empty yet still ringing. I turned the lining inside out.

That’s when I saw it. A huge hole in the lining and a weighted rectangle singing it’s song in the middle. So although my 8+ was close to becoming a relic, it was still perfectly functional. I was fine to continue using it. Yet I had literally just spent $500+ to replace the handheld computer I could not live without. For even 24 hours.

I guess that will tell you how much I rely on this technology I was so hesitant to embrace not all that long ago.