Oh Yeah and then

The baby flushed my mobile phone down the toilet. Sabrina has an unnatural fascination with the old water closet and lies in wait for any opportunity to dive in. Whenever the door is left open she’s in there in seconds commencing her flotation experiments with whatever valuables she can get her chubby little fingers on. So I’m afraid I have to admit I’ve become a bit of a toilet Nazi, as soon as I hear the flush I’m screaming “Shut the door, Shut the DOOOR!!!”

But last week she slipped past my stringent security measures and the end result is that now I don’t have a phone. This meant that when I stopped to get a little petrol, because the red light was glaring at me all the way to the kids afternoon club, I had no mobile phone.  And When I tried to use my new card to pay and the words that came up on the machine said DECLINED contact bank and the line of people began to snake out the door as I tried and tried again to get it to work. I HAD NO MOBILE PHONE. I had no way of ringing anyone to come and save me. It’s funny I wouldn’t have said I was a big mobile phone user but the security that you feel knowing that any number (no pun intended) of knights in shining armour are only a call away is total bliss.

I had no idea what happened when you couldn’t pay for petrol, the only thing that was jumping to mind was a story I had heard about a service station owner holding a guys kids for security while he went to get money and there was no way I was passing my babies over to the the grumpy lady behind the counter.

“Oh well, you’ll have to fill out a blue form then” replied the service station lady and I realised that the thoughts that had been running around my head had gotten out and I was standing there in a trance repeating “What do I do, What do I do???” In the end she was really nice, just a gruff personality probably suited to dealing with a daily dose of burly truck drivers. At one point I must have seemed a little too shaky because she looked up at me and said “And you can stop panicking it’s fine, but if you don’t come back and pay the $47 by tomorrow the police will be getting involved”

I was so apologetic to the large queue behind me and kept repeating how sorry I was as I made my retreat. One nice man in the queue tried to put me at my easy saying “Don’t stress, It happens to everyone.” “Really?” I thought as I headed back the the car, everyone has their bag snatched, their new card declined and their mobiles flushed down the toilet, I never knew.