Ten Minutes of Heavy Breathing

That's what I left on my friend's answering machine today by accident.

It all started with a trip to the phone kiosk at the mall, where the salesman behind the counter peered with disdain at the chipped, scratched, vaguely phone-like device I was holding.

"What happened to it?" he asked.

"Well, you see, I bicycle a lot. And people are always calling me. And, well, it's been dropped from my bike. At about 20 miles an hour. A few times."

The nice man at the kiosk set me up with a new phone (fortunately, my old one expired just as my time was up on my plan) and this one has Bluetooth. Voila! Phone goes in Bentobox on frame, headset fits under helmet. Hands-free talking means I can pedal and chat with wild abandon. Except that I apparently didn't quite fully understand all the steps needed to hang up a call. So when I called my friend S. to ask if he was going to an event tomorrow and accidentally didn't quite hit the button all the way to turn the dang thing off, I left more than a few minutes of HRZ3 hills on his answering machine, and that sounds basically like a whole lot of heavy breathing. I did call back and apologize.

Overall though, embarassing phone messages aside, I'm going to really like the Bluetooth phone. I'm kind of a techno-gadget kind of gal to start with, and I've got the 80,000 different chargers plugged in to every socket in our house to prove it. I come by it naturally, having gone into computer science in the day when I was one of two gals in my University's entire CIS program (that was back when they still called it Computer & Information Sciences and we mostly programmed on the mainframe), and matriculating from there straight to Microsoft in its pre-Windows days (when Bill G. had an office down the hall and fewer people worked there than my hometown population of 2,000). I call my PocketPC my "auxiliary brain", took it as a complement when my son said I was "kind of Vulcan" and can beat my kids on Tetris with my mouse-hand tied behind my back.

So even though I'm a bit behind the vanguard in becoming one of those strange people who seem to walk around talking to themselves until you see the little metal blob on their ear, I'm happy to be able to use my bike time to catch up with people I never seem to get the chance to talk with without a thousand and one interruptions (hmmmm, maybe it's the fact that my kids aren't usually with me when I'm cycling that makes it easier?) Now I've just got to figure out a way to use my iPod and my Bluetooth concurrently and I'll really be set. A friend's airplane has this great intercom/stereo system that is interlinked so that whenever you need to talk to the tower, the stereo automatically cuts out. Maybe that will be the next phone...