Contact-less and how!

Yeah it happens to everyone and it has happened to me too a couple of times. Your trustworthy mobile phone sometimes cannot handle the work pressure and decides to go into hibernation and comes back to life but with no memory whatsoever of its earlier life or just decides to take off to another world (read dead or stolen). A friend of mine buzzed me today to ask my phone number as he had lost his mobile. That's when I started thinking of a life without the contacts, since contacts are supposed to be a person's backbone (really?).

But its not at all that bad you know. Like some long lost philosopher who said something about dark clouds and silver linings, I feel that this one also comes with its own share of benefits. Some of the positive points of losing your phone book numbers -

• In this age of Facebook, Gmail Chat and Skype, getting back the numbers is not that difficult. One common mail or a status message is enough to get them back. And if you think you are a person who has "important" contacts saved on their phone, well, everyone has them. Just ask the person sitting right next to you at work!
• You come to know the actual number of people who exist in your part of the stratosphere. The phone that is otherwise filled with so many random numbers and names that you might not even remember now but just ended up saving thinking they will be useful in the future, now only has the contacts of the people who matter to you most. And yeah you would be surprised that you can actually count them and really tell how big your world actually is.
• Most importantly, it serves as an excuse to think of those people who you would really want to stay in touch with, but perhaps did not take the initiative to do so or may be just played lazy. You get to touch base with them once again and hopefully this time, you would value the second chance you had got and ensure that the person is more than just a number in your contact list.
• When you start saving the numbers yet again, you take time and observe. Sometimes it so happens that the name that goes with the number may not be the same as what it was earlier. For example, a friend whose name you'd earlier saved as "Laxmy.XYZ" since college days, would now be saved as say "Lax" ;-) Earlier in my college days, I never bothered to save the person's last name. But not anymore, considering how I always come across people who have very common names that most probably already exist in your contact list. All colleagues and ex-colleagues are saved as the person's name followed by the organization name. So, do these changes say something about me? Well, I have changed. Go figure how :-P
• And last but never the least, if someone complains later how you never stay in touch, you can always say, "Arey yaar, my phone crashed/ I lost my mobile! What to do? You didn't call either!" ;-)