alive-ish or deadoid
Lately I’ve realized that I’ve added a new category to animate and inanimate objects. An inanimate object that is networked is more “alive” to me than, say, a rock. My desktops are alive, Tivo is alive, my laptop is a sort of Lazarus or Christ-figure – alive when there’s Wifi and dead when there isn’t.
Yesterday this eccentric view led to a small tragedy. Let’s gloss over the unappetising details of exactly how my new phone got wet and skip to the part where I fished it out, dried it and called Jeremy to see if it was still working. As it turns out, this was exactly the wrong thing to do, and it phlogisted the ethereals or something. Jeremy’s voice got fainter and fainter and eventually faded away.
The poor phone; it wanted to live. It struggled valiantly to stay up, but eventually the light on its screen flickered and went out. It died in my hands.
I was stricken. I really need to anthropomorphize less.
It’s unbelievably lucky that I uploaded all the good pictures to Flickr only days before the phone gave up the ghost.
