posted by Mike on Sep 3
I am a notoriously slow adapter to cell phone evolution and as such have been rocking it 2001 style for some time. Last summer I took a road trip with some friends and forgot my charger. We stopped at a Verizon store and the saleswoman laughed at me when I showed her my phone, they hadn’t carried accessories for that model for years. Rest assured she did little to hide the pure disdain in her voice. Fortunately, we drove briefly through Arkansas where the lone gas station we stopped at carried six year old cell phone chargers. This will color my perception of Arkansas forever.
Anyway. I’ve got a new phone. It even has a camera, so now I’m living in 2004. I still have the same number so when you call it will still be me ignoring you. My old phone existed in a cell phone purgatory between life and death so the new phone is beyond justified but it still makes me sad. This phone has seen some crazy times in my life and I’ll miss it. Most of all I’ll miss the saved text messages from the past few years and thought I’d revisit them as an obituary to a fallen comrade (that’d be the phone). Some are hilarious, some sentimental, some bizarre but if you sent me one of these it made my life happier over and over since you sent it.
A few have been left out to protect the guilty. Or because I’m lazy.
May 13th, 2006 - 12:09 AM - “Not getting you a beer” - Dave
I was out in Georgetown with a couple friends at a two-story bar. The first floor was empty but the second packed to the walls because Georgetown is filled with pretentious, illogical assholes. We started taking turns getting our drinks from the downstairs bar because the people we were meeting were bombed and refusing to leave the second floor. My friend Dave heads down and has been gone for twenty minutes when I finally receive the above text message. Obviously, he met a girl. Dammit.
Meanwhile, upstairs I’ve been talking to this cute Indian girl who works with a friend of a friend. I have a girlfriend so I’m just killing time until Dave brings my beer. Dave’s not bringing my beer. I excuse myself to the bar. The girl follows, apparently she’s mistaken my aloofness for GAME. This happens to me way too much. She decides we need to do shots of tequila. I decline because there is no way I am buying a drunk girl I don’t know a $10 shot so I say I don’t want to do any shots. She offers to buy them. I decline again, she offers to buy me a beer and a shot if I’ll do the shot with her. What!? Girls really are into assholes. I acquiesce because that’s a hell of a deal and I am very poor. We do the shots and I start working on the beer. This girl proceeds to buy me another beer and another two shots. She’s bought me five drinks in about an hour. Around this time my friend Dave finally shows his face again.
The girl he’s been buying drinks for all night just bailed with her friends, he didn’t even get a number and now he’s pissed and looking to leave. So I pull the same stunt on the girl buying me drinks and get the hell out. I feel kind of bad about that but, hey, I have a girlfriend and none of it was my idea. Anyway, I love this message because the sending and receiving of the message transformed both our nights so radically and I know it pissed Dave off.
Some of that story may be incorrect. My memory is somewhat incomplete.
June 28th, 2006 - 11:25 PM - ”Best cab drive ever! i am back now :)” - Amy
Days before moving into our new house in DC my roommates and I met at our favorite bar to have a beer pong competition to decide how we picked rooms in the house. I won. Not an essential point to this story. We had a couple drinks afterwards but it was a weeknight so a few of us grabbed a cab back to Virginia. That’s when the fun started.
Our cab driver, a well-dressed African, was in his late twenties, early thirties spoke English with a hip, foreign accent and blasted hip-hop. Three of us in the back he takes off down the road, turns to look at us and asks, “Do you guys like beer?”. I assume he’s commenting that he picked us up in Adam’s Morgan and we have clearly been drinking so we answer to the affirmative since denial seems implausible. Judging our inebriation and ready affirmation he grabs a six-pack of Heineken from the floor, cracks open four and hands three back to us and starts drinking. When in Rome.
“Do you like to dance?”
Well, not particularly but this hardly seems the time for inhibition. “Yes, I do like to dance.”
“Then let’s dance!”
And he cranks the music up and we all start dancing while we drink our Heinekens and fly down 18th St in Washington DC. Suddenly, he slams the car to a stop behind another cab. Runs out, yells at the cab driver, soon returns with an enormous wad of cash and we off we go again drinking and dancing our way back to Virginia.
What tip do you leave after that cab ride?
November 17th, 2006 - 8:52 PM - “Look to la luna” - Jay
If you’ve played Mortal Kombat II this should need no explanation.
April 26th, 2007 - 9:33 PM - “you = gay” - Jay
May, 21st 2007 - 12:25 AM - “You = really gay” - Jay
Thanks, buddy!
August 14th, 2007 - 10:03 PM - “David and I just got engaged!” - My Sister
Awwwwwwww!
June 2nd, 2008 - 7:26 PM - “Bacon?” - William
William likes bacon. And gin.
You have no idea how many hookers i’m gonna buy ~ Andrew
