One second I was playing Candy Crush and scanning my boarding pass for my flight back from winter break. Next thing I know, my screen was a pale, dead, glowing white, taunting me while I tried not to cry, desperately trying to buy plane WiFi to send panicked messages to my parents on my laptop.
As the guy at the phone repair store later told me, my phone’s Liquid-crystal display (LCD) had cracked. Translation: I was screwed, and just in time for the first week of the new semester. May I just say, being cut off cold turkey from communicating from one’s long distance boyfriend, friends, and family during the craziness of syllabus week is not easy. I was confined to online messengers and reliant on uscstudent WiFi (not the most comforting consolation). Gone was the comfort of listening to music on the way to class. My long walks to and from my volunteering position at Historic Columbia were treks into the unknown—navigating a city I’m not entirely familiar with, sans Google Maps, was like flying blind.
I’m not trying to write one of those think pieces where I moan about how dependent we all are on technology and how we can’t live without it: as an out-of-state student, I love feeling less distant from the people that aren’t here at USC with me, and I love the utility of having any information at the swipe of a screen. Going without a phone didn’t change my life or make me a better person; it made me value the resources I usually take for granted. I can tell you that when I picked my phone up after a week at the repair shop and got to pick up where I had left off on my game of Candy Crush, I almost cried.
