Punctuation is usually my best friend. You know how English teachers always have that fire truck red pen that they use to cover the papers you spend hours on with criticisms and corrections? I love doing things like that. I get some sick pleasure out of the ability to look at another human being and say, truthfully, "Hey, dumbass, I speak words better than you!" Then, I get punched and I get a tooth knocked out, but at least I'll be able to tell the doctor what happened to me with a rich vocabulary, and my affidavit from the ensuing assault and battery case will have properly placed commas and semicolons.
Yesterday, however, punctuation turned on me for the first time. I know things between the question mark and I were growing distant and our relationship was strained and questionable (please forgive me), but I didn't know things were bad enough for it to invade my phone.
My Droid is my baby. People tell me that I don't need a phone that fancy, and it's a waste of money, but I'll never believe them. My Droid and I have something that the rest of the human world will never understand. It is my comfort. It doesn't judge me for staying up until 5 AM and waking up at 2 PM all flustered and wondering where the day went. It is always sitting undisturbed in its charging cradle, waiting for me to swipe my finger across its surface and bring it to life. (I'm inventing a new genre -- it's called phonoerotica)
When I drop it, I might as well have dropped a living baby. It does not cry, but I know it is in pain. Before today, it weathered the pain and remained healthy, After the fall onto the hardwood floor yesterday, though, it got infected with a question mark. The question mark manifested itself in the battery life indicator. The cute green bar letting me know when it was time to put my baby to rest was no longer apparent. I panicked. I was inconsolable. I rushed down the stairs to verbalize my grief with my mother, but it was to no avail; she did not understand the depth of my distress. The only answer was open-heart surgery.
I removed the battery cover and started shuffling around its insides. It kept turning itself off. You will probably visualize this scene differently than I did:
As you can tell, I have a bit of a flair for the dramatic.
The thought of replacing my baby with another baby was horrifying. It wouldn't have my apps yet and it wouldn't have my data, sure, but those things are fixable. It wouldn't have my baby's personality. It wouldn't do that cute thing where I'm trying to look something up and it's really important to know quickly and it pops up that adorable window saying "Process Browser is not responding" and plays with me.
After about thirty minutes of fumbling, I managed to make the uninvited punctuation mark go away, and the green bar I missed so passionately returned. The question mark has not made any more attempts since then, but I am still keeping a close eye. It is such an attention whore.
(Wahoo! I managed to write this entire post without a question mark.)
