Marie Callender's Revenge

She had her reasons for "pause" when she put the chicken pot pies in the cart at Sam's last week. She thought her hesitation was more because of the salt content, the fat, the MSG, and all manner of "Good mamas don't feed their kids this junk" concerns that caused her hand to hover over the cart with Marie Callender's little "Preservative Pots" in hand. But she shrugged off the nagging sense of "Don't do it!" and put them in the cart anyway. All her reasons to cave seemed valid: her out-of-town weekend trip meant the kids/their Daddy needed convenience food. Football season was putting a time crunch on dinner time and it would be nice to have some microwaveable offerings for the kiddos. And so forth and so on. Little did she know.......
Saturday night, small Texas town. Youth league football game in progress. She was perched in the top row of the bleachers with two of her children. Third child on the football field keeping the water bottles well guarded. She was trying to set up the brought-along "dinner" which consisted of (mothers everywhere brace yourselves for the shocking menu to follow) two Preservative Pots (aka, Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pies) (yes, it's weird football game food, but she'd already nuked them and the family was running late, so she threw them in the car with some plastic forks and thought they'd just manage). Back to the menu: okay, two pot pies as already mentioned, CapriSuns, and Little Debbie "Cosmic Brownies." (Fit that onto the MyPyramid.gov website.)
As the children were peacefully eating their chicken pot pies (yes, it's a little odd, acknowledged that already), she bumped her mobile phone.The phone came loose from the clip on her pocketbook. She began to frantically try to prevent its sudden-death plunge through the spaces on the bleachers to the ground several feet below. In a moment that shall remained frozen in her mental DVR for all time, the phone bounced around a bit, and then, alas, dear readers, landed in one of the children's pot pies. Charging port side in first. (The little hole thing where the charger plugs in, that is.)
For a moment, she froze. Unable to act. Staring at the phone sticking up out of the pot pie. She was momentarily reminded of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial from her childhood where two Brits alternately exclaim, "You goht youh peanut buttah in my chocolate." and "You goht youh chocolate in my peanut buttah." She also immediately regretted her new "small-pocketbook-woman" tack she'd recently adopted because that meant all hopes of a Kleenex, napkin, or even a child's Pull-Up as had been known to dwell in previous larger pocketbooks, were fruitless. She equally regretted wearing a hand-wash only, light-colored shirt with new pants which made the thought of wiping her gravy phone on the clothing an unpleasant prospect. So, she did what any mom would do: she freed the phone from the pot pie mire, winced at the sucking sound of the phone releasing itself from artificially flavored gravy, and began to lick it clean.
The absurdity of the moment was in no way lost on her; and her pride was somewhat bruised by the sniggers of fellow spectators (namely, two bratty teenagers whose view of a 37-year-old woman licking her mobile phone at a football game managed to break their otherwise laser beam focus on photographing themselves with their gravy-free picture phones.) The former schoolteacher rose up in this woman and she quickly acknowledged to the girls that she was, in fact, licking her phone and in her best peeved tone inquired as to whether these girls might have a tissue about them. When they gave their best Lindsay Lohan impersonation of a "Whatever!" shrug, she resumed her cleaning process.
Fast forward to the next day: her phone has now begun to operate in what her cheeky, impudent husband refers to as "random mode." It now seemingly has the ability to "charge" even though it's not plugged into any charger of any sort. It is also fond of the "CAR KIT" mode which she was unaware even existed. It makes a irksome chime UP/chime DOWN sound as it seemingly scrolls through its now scrambled brain for a place to land. It sound like a question followed by an answer; the tone goes up (question?), the tone goes down (answer!) "Pot pies stink?" "You betcha!" or maybe "Get a new phone?" "'Fraid so."
This downcast, poor humbled woman has spent the better part of this evening weighing the pros and cons of new gravy-free mobile phones for her and her husband. Her head is swirling from phrases like, "VCast," "Bluetooth," "VGA," and all manner of contract lingo that the wireless phone company sets forth. She feels a slight stab of pain/embarassment mingled with financial nausea at the prospect of indentured mobile phonehood for the next 24 months, and all because of a sorry pot pie.
The moral of the story is perhaps a bit elusive. Maybe it's about listening to your inner voice talk about MSG and preservatives because maybe more than your health is at stake---it could be your technology, too. Maybe it's about not taking weird food to football games. Or maybe it's just about giving one's friends the opportunity to laugh their fannies off at one's follies. Take your pick. And let this dear woman know which option you choose. But just don't call her-----her mobile is still far too screwed up to take calls.