By SCOTT SAALMAN
Scaramouch
LONDON – I was zonked in the basement of the Natural History Museum, snoozing to near extinction beneath the dinosaur bones displayed on the floor just above me. My whirlwind, mostly sleepless, five-night stint in Paris and London had finally taken a toll on me during a rainy Monday morning in London town, my final full day abroad before an early morning return-home flight from Heathrow.
When I travel overseas, I develop an obsessive compulsive disorder when it comes to keeping track of what I consider the vital “big three” of a world traveler’s personal effects: passport, wallet, phone.
My right hand pats my chest, checking for my passport stored in a neck pouch. My left hand pats my left pants’ pocket for my wallet. My right hand then pats the phone lump in my right pocket. The same sequence, right hand, left hand, right hand, over and over: passport, wallet, phone, passport, wallet, phone, faster and faster, my triangle of pats sounding like a tribal war drum, passport, wallet, phone, passport, wallet, phone, through the airport, on the plane, in the taxis, trains, buses and tour boats, passport, wallet, phone, passport, wallet, phone. A sense of relief returns each time I retouch that trio of lumps during my personal pat-down.
Children’s voices awoke me in the basement. Immediately, my OCD kicked in.
Passport … Check.
Wallet … Check.
Phone … Uh oh.
My right pocket lacked a lump. Empty.
No phone.
Mommy.
Suddenly, I went from being weary to being wary so far from home.
And scared. Yes, scared. I’ll admit it. Scared to the core in that natural history museum basement. Phoneless, I felt like I had become history, ancient history, as if I was now a new museum display: ANCIENT CELL PHONELESS MAN.
To lose your phone in your homeland – or in your own home for that matter – is reason enough to put oneself in dire straits. But to suddenly find yourself phoneless in another land? The mobile phone is a vital organ to mankind now. I’m certain children in the future will already be born with them.
Earlier, the museum’s Charles Darwin statue brought to mind “survival of the fittest,” a phrase I first learned in grade school. As we have evolved, survival of the fittest today likely refers to one who carries a smartphone. Suddenly, I was not among the fittest.
There is a Wikipedia entry called Nomophobia: The fear of being out of mobile phone contact. Symptoms: anxiety, respiratory alterations, trembling, perspiration, agitation, disorientation. Or see Scott Saalman without his cellphone. It was a “Ground Control to Major Tom: your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong” moment.
I looked beneath the bench to see if the phone had dropped there. There was nothing but bare floor.
While I had been sleeping, the basement became filled with grade-school-aged children. It was apparently the mother of all school field trips. Kids sitting at lunch tables, screaming and shouting.
In America, I had been forewarned that Europe was full of pickpockets. This claim was substantiated two days earlier when I saw numerous signs at the Eiffel Tower stating, “Beware of the Pickpockets.” Had one of the kids pickpocketed me during my slumber? They started early. I was certain of it. They’re just doing their part to live up to those signs.
The basement children, the potential pickpockets, were everywhere, hundreds of them. The adult chaperones looked to be at wits’ end over all these “bricks in the wall.” It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear an authoritative voice get all Pink Floyd and rise above the ruckus, “If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”
There I was in what many consider to be the world’s preeminent center of natural history and research, but it was all lost on me. All I could think about was my missing smartphone. To hell with the 80 million items that are basically the ingredients of the planet and life as we know it.
I thought about asking a chaperone to dial my number while I desperately raced thru botany, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology, and zoology – I could have lost my phone anywhere – knocked over dinosaur skeletons and listened intently for my sacred iPhone Strum ringtone. But the museum was too monolithic. My phone’s battery would likely be drained before finding it.
What to do? What to do?
Backtrack, my mind told me. Backtrack.
So, I backtracked, starting first at the last place I recalled stopping, the basement cafeteria counter where I had purchased a sandwich and tea an hour before. I couldn’t believe it. There was my phone on the counter near the cash register where I had obviously left it when pulling pounds from my wallet to pay for my purchase. My phone was solid black. So was the countertop it rested on. It was blessedly camouflaged.
Overjoyed, I grabbed it and rushed up the stairs, practically skipping like a giddy schoolgirl past the famous, 152-foot-long Diplodocus carnegii skeleton in the central hall, on out the door and into the central London rain. I was reunited with my iPhone. I felt so alive. I was the luckiest man in the world, back again among the fittest in lucky old London. I giddily dodged water puddles on the sidewalks of South Kensington, my feet moving to the beat of passport, wallet, phone, passport, wallet, phone. Nomophobia no more.
I thought about calling someone to tell them about my good fortune, but alas, I didn’t really have anyone to call.
Contact: scottsaalman@gmail.com. Buy Scott’s column collections on Amazon.