You never realize how much you rely on something until it suddenly stops working.

This afternoon my co-worker asked me if I was able to make any calls on my cell phone (we both have Sprint). I gave it a shot and it looked like it was starting to dial, but then it just went back to the main screen. I tried a few more times and got the same results. Then I tried calling my cell phone from my desk and it went straight to voicemail.

Not knowing exactly what was going on, I gave Sprint a call. At first the lady told me she had no idea and then she said “oh wait, an announcement just came up that we’re experiencing outages in the network across the entire state of Ohio.” Perfect.

So I drive home from work and tonight I have plans to meet my parents for dinner. I pull out the cell phone to give them a call - nothing. No problem I figure, I’ll just give them a call on the land line. Wait, I haven’t had one of those in over a year! Not having the ability to instantly communicate, I felt cut off from the world. What if there had been an emergency?

A couple of hours later and everything was back to normal. It does leave me wondering though whether I have become too dependent on my cell phone. Do I really need to be accessible all the time? Maybe one of these days I’ll just leave it at home and see how I cope. My guess: it’ll feel very liberating.