Auto-Destruct

I bought a burner phone. Not because I’ll be making shady calls to a witch doctor again anytime soon (I hope), or because I might have a wife and kids hidden in God-knows-where district, fifteen hours from Lusaka. Well, not the last time I checked, at least. My reason is a lot less exciting: I broke my smartphone.

I have never bought myself a phone. By circumstance or design, I’ve always received hand-me-downs from family members upgrading their contracts. So, every year around Christmas, I perk up my ears for any mentions of new phones. Then I not-so-subtly leave mine in the living room or kitchen, its cracked screen and phone cover—which looks like it was chewed by a jilted Rottweiler in heat—visible for all to see. Pity anyone? Mother, father, or perhaps that estranged cousin I haven’t seen in years?

This year, I managed to destroy my phone before Christmas. It began when I deliberately removed its cover and screen protector. I can’t remember exactly why I did that, but I know I was generally dissatisfied with having this thing, this appendage, with me at all times. Like a prosthetic limb, I neither needed nor wanted, handed to me by people with phone contracts. Which feels like the worst kind of prosthetic limb to have: no heroic story of losing my leg bravely fighting children in third-world countries. Just my phone, surveilled personally by big tech CEOs, whom I don’t care about and therefore do not know.

Many noble deaths begin with a karate kick, and the slow demise of my phone was no different. I was karate-kicking a mosquito in the living room when my phone slipped out of my pyjama pants and fell on the screed flooring. My girlfriend laughed; this is what I took to be a natural response to the sheer brilliance of my kick. Or perhaps a sadistic giggle at the state of my phone, which now sported three ink blobs of blackness on the screen. The mosquito got away.

After that, I stopped counting how many times it fell out of my pants or just seemed to slip out of my hands for no reason whatsoever. It dropped on grass, concrete, the vegetable patch, my dog’s face, and many other surfaces found between and beyond. Eventually, about 90% of my phone screen was black. It was as if it were set to auto-destruct, like a self-sabotaging spy gadget in a low-budget action film.

This was not a little source of pride. Ha! So, do you have a fully functional phone? Well, look at this! I’d then show some poor sod, minding his own business with his face buried in his phone, that I care not one jot for mine. Pity would darken his face like a passing cloud before he mumbled something like ‘shame’ and then went back to his phone.

But I still used it. I would try to read messages by inference and type messages from the keyboard’s muscle memory, which led to a happy dose of confusion for both me and others. I once saved someone’s number as “Se Bydhip M” instead of “Dr Bishop M.” In my defence, who is both a doctor and a bishop? Seems like overkill. So, I would call people up instead. This may defeat the very purpose of texting, but I figured it was also quite a thoughtful gesture. After all, who wouldn’t want to hear from me?

Eventually, I gave up on my phone. Not because I was embarrassed (an emotion reserved for lesser mortals) but because it took on a life of its own. It would suddenly switch off without warning me, and one missed call merged into another, so I started phoning back unsuspecting people. There is probably some pithy piece of wisdom hiding behind all this—something about taking care of things, or the demerits of irresponsibility, or why we all need phone contracts to live fulfilling lives. But the truth is, I’d do it all again—I’d karate kick a mosquito and lovingly phone and harass the good doctor and/or bishop. It turns out that even with a burner phone, I can still do all of that.