I Understand

I see them everywhere:  in restaurants, elevators, the grocery store.  People scroll busily through their I Phones, even when they're talking to someone else in the real world or turning on their car ignition.  It's as if those devices were glued on and if you didn't turn them on the second you had time, they (or you) might explode.

Now, thanks to Hurricane Harvey, I understand.  

Although I live in a high-rise building and only the basement flooded, the power went out.  No electricity, no TV, no computer and, OMG, no phone. And for a few days, with most of Houston's streets under water, no newspaper. My I Phone became my outlet to the world.  Back in the day, before the storm, I used the phone to make occasional calls and as a camera, but over the last two weeks, besides calling friends, I read the news, the weather reports, listened to late night TV hosts' monologues, followed the Houston Astros and the U.S. Open tennis tournament.  At night I found music on youtube that lulled me to sleep.  I even had Siri tell me jokes--she knows a lot of them.

So I will no longer criticize people whose phones seem to be an extra appendage and who scroll through them as if their lives depended on it.  I get it now.  The I Phone was my lifeline and my fingers were just as busy as those people in elevators who walk out, still scrolling, when the elevator has reached their floor.