Day 16: The Day My iPhone Broke

My iPhone is broken. It was perfectly fine one moment, then stone cold dead the next. I've tried everything to turn it back on. I've tried charging it, hard resetting it, even praying to it. Nothing! I've gone from holding the world's best phone to holding the world's most expensive brick in a matter of seconds.

It's ridiculously inconvenient when your phone doesn't work. What's really annoying, however, is that it has the only alarm clock that I trust to wake me up in the morning. The last time I tried to use something other than my mobile to wake me up, it was an absolute disaster.

It was the night before I had a big meeting that was due to last the whole day. I'd only been working for about four months, so I was extra keen to make a good impression. The meeting was due to start at 8.30am in Waterloo. To make it on time, I needed to set my alarm for about 6am. The problem was, my iPhone was broken at the time (it's amazing, they can put a man on the moon, but they can't make an iPhone that works).

I thought my best option was to set an alarm on my laptop. Unfortunately, it never went off. I didn't just oversleep...I didn't wake up until 10.30am. The meeting had already been running for two hours and I was still in bed. I don't think I've ever got dressed so quickly in my life. Imagine the faces of my colleagues and my director when I burst into the meeting just as they were about to break for lunch!

I wasn't taking any chances this time. I managed to hunt down as many alarm clocks as I could find in the house and spent the last five minutes before bed setting alarms on six different devices.

At 7.30am this morning I was woken up violently by a discordant orchestra of buzzes, chimes and beeps. After a few seconds, I'd managed to switch off five out of six alarms. One of them was missing...Clocky.

You see, Clocky is no ordinary alarm clock. Clocky has wheels. When 7.30am strikes, Clocky's wheels start spinning furiously. He jumps off the bedside table and rides around the bedroom looking for an obscure place to hide. This means you have to get out of bed in order to turn him off. Some call him a snoozer's worst nightmare. I call him a little sh*t.

I spent the next couple of minutes trying to work out where the beeping was coming from, until I realised that he'd managed to roll under my bed and wedge himself behind a cardboard box. At 7.35 this morning, I found myself on my hands and knees, crawling under my bed looking for an alarm clock. I emerged covered in dirt, irritable, and with a dusty cobweb clinging to my eyelids. Not a great start to the week!

The day was reasonably busy, but relatively uneventful. Within seconds of getting home, however, I managed to break something else...my shisha. For those of you who don't know, a shisha is a fruity tobacco pipe (don't worry, it's perfectly legal).

Somehow, I had knocked it off the kitchen unit, causing it to shatter on the floor. I'm gutted! The shisha and I have been through so much together. It even made a cameo appearance in one of the most memorable moments to have ever taken place in my household.

Picture the scene....a warm summer's afternoon in 2008. Family and friends are gathered in the garden to celebrate my 21st birthday. My parents are sitting at a table on the patio whilst Tamara, my friends and I are chatting on the grass, which I should add is a lot higher than the patio level. My brother is also on the grass, smoking the shisha with his friends. A peaceful, civilised scene.

After a couple of hours my grandma arrived. As I mentioned, this happened a few years ago, a time before my grandma had started making clay sculptures of my girlfriend's head. In fact, it was the first time Tamara had ever met my grandma. She walked across the patio and spotted my brother smoking the shisha. She climbed up onto the grass and walked over to him. I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen. I thought there was a strong chance she was going to tell him off for smoking.

And then those immortal words were uttered from my grandma's mouth, 'I love a bit of that. Let's have a puff'. I don't know what she even thought it was, but she grabbed the pipe and drew in a long deep breath. The rest of us looked on in disbelief.

For a couple of seconds, nothing really happened. My grandma then proceeded to stagger around the garden like a deer that had just been shot with a rifle. 'Ooo I feel a little bit queer', she yelped, as she accelerated towards the edge of the grass before stage-diving head first down a few rocks and onto the patio below.

The chairs parted like the Red Sea as my grandma face-planted the ground. I took Tamara by the hand, walked over to my grandma, who was lying dazed in a mangled heap on the floor and said, 'Tamara this is my grandma. Grandma, this is Tamara.'

*          *          *

I decided today that I'm going to take a break from blogging for a while. I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who's read and enjoyed the blog over the past couple of weeks. Thank you, in particular, to everyone who has commented, 'liked' and shared the blog with their friends. The praise you have all given me has been unbelievable and I appreciate it very much.

I actually can't believe how many times people have visited my blog since New Year's Day. As I write this, the site has received 170 hits today alone. And since I started the blog, I've had a total of over 1,800 hits. Considering that about 90% of these have come directly from the links that have been shared on Facebook, I have to say that it's quite frankly incredible.

I won't say that I'm stopping forever. I have no doubt that I'll be back sometime later in the year with more daily anecdotes and musings. But until then, thank you again. Matt x