Cell Phones: For Talking On, Not About

I have a friend who used to say that conversations about flight delays and last night's dreams were off-limits, because everyone has them, and they're not nearly as interesting to your listener as they are to you. To the list of verboten topics, I would add stories about technological glitches.

Still, I can't resist telling you that I've been in cell-phone hell for the past few days. After my well-worn iPhone fell into the toilet the other day (don't ask), I had to pull my back-up iPhone out of my drawer (don't ask) to reactivate it. This was not as simple as it sounds, because these things never are. But taking a page from the Obamas, as columnist Jill Lawrence points out on PD today, the rep at the AT & T store tried to turn the whole experience into a teachable moment. When I explained how my phone came to be water-logged, she said, "They don't swim."

And I thought they did.