So you're not actually supposed to put sugar into the battery jack of the phone. Interesting.

One of the things I forgot to mention on my list of items that are causing my money to disappear was a phone. I was not particularly enthused about the idea of getting a phone, mostly because all my phones seem to come to bad ends.

Today I purchased the fourth cell phone I've had in the past year. I realized that I can't really afford to live without a phone, both for safety reasons and because I'll kill the next person who gives me a sympathetic ook when I say that I don't have a phone number. But I know that somewhere down the line, I'm going to get my heart broken.

My first cell phone was a Nokia 3390. It had a gold face plate—at least, it was mostly gold. The corners and edges were pale grey where the paint had been scraped off by repeated dropping. I accidentally put that phone in a cup holder in my car, which wouldn't have been a problem if my friend I. hadn't spilled a quarter-inch of Sprite in the cupholder the day before. The display was never quite the same after that.

That phone lasted until I went to Austria, where it propmtly became (more) useless, and I got a new, relatively inexpensive prepaid phone. It was shiny and silver and had decent-sized buttons. It's actually still shiny and silver with decent sized buttons, but it doesn't work because I dropped it in a cup of tea. I had just gotten off the phone with my mother and was getting ready to go to sleep. I reached over to put the phone across the top of an empty mug. Too bad that I missed the rim and that the mug was not, in fact, empty. Blutorangentee and electronics evidently don't really mix.

The second phone I had in Austria was great, as well—for three months. Then, when I went to Croatia, it mysteriously turned itself off and refused to allow itself to be turned on again (insert your own sex joke here). I took it in to be fixed ten days before I left. As far as I know, it's still at the repair place, because despite repeated assurances of efficiency, they failed to return it in the allotted time and I left for the U.S. without it.

So now I have this new phone, a Sony Ericsson that's a little clunky and absolutely covered with that little orange Cingular character, but it's got color display and it will be able to call a tow truck if I ever have a blowout on the freeway. Of course, now I have to go through all the new phone rigamarole: pick a ring tone, painstakingly type all my friends' names and numbers in, offend everyone when my phone rings on volume 10 in the middle of a meeting, gum up the display screen with finger prints.

Hm. I think I need a cup of tea.