Another Piece Gone

I have given up on my Sony Ericsson mobile. In the past, it has given me lots of problems - I had to bring it back to the authorised agent less than 6 months after the purchase date. The servicing was free then as it was still under warranty and I must say the after-sale service was superb - efficient and prompt. Nevertheless, when one buys a durable good, one would prefer not to have to test the effectiveness of its after-sale service.

Even after the servicing and changing of parts, I lived with a cranky phone and a crankier joystick for years. The joystick was insensitive at times and when you applied more force, it jumped several notches down the list of options. It just did not want to point where you wanted it to. It was enough to make you want to scream. But to buy a new phone when this phone was functional - despite its quirkiness - would have been wasteful.

Anyway, finally, bits of the black casing started falling off last week, thus making it impossible for me to continue using the phone. Aha... now I do not have to contend with a guilty conscience when I go shopping for a new mobile.

As I do not have the time to shop for a new phone just yet, as a stop-gap measure, I am now using my hubby's spare phone.

That's when I realise there is a problem. The list of contacts in my old phone cannot be merged into my hubby's phone due to lack of memory space. I had to delete some "memory" in my phone. Anyway, I guess it is high time to do some house-keeping. The numbers that I have not used for years will have to make way for those with higher frequency of use.

So this morning, I set out the task to delete low-priority contacts. The majority of these are contacts that I have been keeping since my Singapore days. I am sure we all have such dormant contacts which we keep, either for sentimental reasons or because we are simply too lazy to remove them. So, one by one, ...

Delete - the colleagues from the bank where I worked.
Delete - the colleagues and lecturers from my NIE (teacher-training) days.
Delete - the colleagues from the school where I taught.
Delete - the students whom I have taught.
Delete - the dentist, doctors, gas man, the children's teachers, the schoolbus driver etc

I kept my friends, my family, my present students, my present colleagues and all those new utility numbers in KL.

But you know, that's a whole chunk of my life in Singapore - deleted.

Sure, some contacts from NIE were nothing more than project-mates. Son No 1's dance teacher's contact from his old school was in my phone simply because I might have needed to contact her over dance matters. The gas man, hell, was just a delivery service!

But those were the pieces that formed a part of my live. Every contact represented some piece of memory. As I deleted the contacts, I paused and remembered those moments I had with each particular person. Just a name and the floodgates of memories opened...

*Random*

- My NIE colleague who helped me source for sheep's hearts for my students' dissection.
- My well-educated, modern and wealthy Brahmin colleague from India who invited me to Calcutta (!) for his grand wedding with a girl of his parents' choice in an arranged marriage.
- My various students, their smiles, and mannerisms.
- And so on, and so on...

*Random*

Well, life goes on, I guess.

Though I did think of copying down those contacts in a faithful (paper-based) notebook, which would not run out of memory space so easily, I think there is no point, really.

Life is now, is it not? Anyway, that's what Oprah would have said.