Black as a dead brick. I tried pressing all its buttons (and combinations of) to see if anything would light up. Nothing. For some reason my phone as it rested on the cafe table had decided to shut down. It was unusual. I was just on it doing a number of things several minutes ago. The battery was not nearly empty. Looking... nor had the battery come loose. Hrm. Nothing.
So I decided to cut my cafe reading time short in order to do the next logical thing - plug my phone into the wall and see if it sparks up. I had only gotten past the third chapter in a fairly thick book loaned to me. I remember thinking how it was just that particular point in a book where it first takes grasp of you. Three chapters of setting up the temperatures of color in your head, then whoa, hey there, a fuzzy had felt its way into you. And you got your first spoon full of (something) from the author. Yum. Then it happened. I reached to check my phone and it was playing dead. Sigh.
Yes I decided to close the book and favor my infomania instead. The cafe wasn't very interesting tonight. Some familiar faces around, but mostly a strange crowd. It's a Friday night. I know cause someone at work commented on how the week is finally over. It has been "a bustling week". The sudden changes in weather has a way of stretching it further in hindsight. And now it's over. It's over in the sense that I can sit and read a book at a cafe. But who am I kidding, this won't last.
I got up. I didn't even bus the table like I usually do. Instead, I looked at my empty bowl of soup, the remaining peasant bread, some unfinished coffee (now cold), and thought to myself: I have sat in this cafe more times than anywhere else in the past few years. And each and every time I have bussed my own table. But I knew that this time I wasn't going to. I was two feet from the door, no one was looking, and my phone is a cold dead brick.
[ Reminded: I use to have a phone with suicidal tendencies. Beep. Whenever the battery ran low, it would beep every few seconds or so to let me know. In doing so it used up even more battery with every. Beep. Thus accelerating and ensuring its imminent death. How tragically cute. Beep. ]
I had the strange good fortune to get my paws on one of Sony Ericcson's new phones, the "Pureness" last week. In addition to igniting some pretty serious reactions in all different directions form my more design-minded friends just from an industrial design perspective, I have to say it's been a little study in the value of simplicity for me.