An "Oh, @#$%!" night

I lost my phone tonight, canceled my husband's, and gave our three cats heart attacks. Okay, maybe not the third one, but I scared the hell out of them.

I was pissed at Verizon because I hate their menu options when you call (using my daughter's phone, since mine was missing). I had gone online and was certain I had checked to report mine lost/stolen. Then hubby said I should call them. I got so pissed by the stupid menu, that I wanted to hit something, so I was cursing so bad a sailor would blush and slammed my hands on the counter. The cats scattered. Mostly, I was pissed at myself.

I had agreed to take the girls to Barnes and Noble to collect on their summer reading (eight books earns a freebie from a small list of books for their ages, even if my kids are advanced readers). Youngest couldn't find her completed sheet and I had gone out to the pickup, set my phone on the side of the bed and forgot it there.

Need I say more or have you put two-and-two together?

For those who don't get it, I forgot my phone there and ended up driving away. I couldn't find it in my purse at the store and figured I must have left it in the house. After spending too much money on new books for both girls, we arrived home to find my phone missing.

That's when I panicked and tried to stop service and messed everything up. I learned by calling it that it hadn't been stopped.

But there's at least a satisfying ending to this story. After trying several times, someone picked up on my phone! He couldn't hear me, however. He finally called from his phone to my daughter's phone, which I was using. It turns out that, while I had lost the phone at an intersection about a mile from our house, he lived nearby--I walk past his house often. Unfortunately, the screen is cracked (badly) and one speaker is broken (why he couldn't hear me when I called it); but it works enough for me to get info from it.

Now, I'm waiting on a tougher phone--I am hard on my cell phones. Saturday should bring a phone so new that Verizon doesn't even have it stocked in the store. It's supposed to be durable, like my old Casio Commando, which I wouldn't have given up if not for the memory hitting its limit.

Apparently, this is a common way to lose cell phones--setting them on vehicles and forgetting them. Don't do it!