I outsourced my brain to my Blackberry and when it dies, I die

I WOULDN’T describe it as a panic attack, but it was one, really.

I got out of the car on Christmas Eve, glanced at the mobile phone and saw that little red icon that comes up when the device is fresh out of power. Or even stale out of power. I was in no condition to judge. In the face of any challenge, I automatically go to the worst-case scenario.

He won’t know where I am, was my first thought. And he always needs to know where I am. It’s not that the man in my life is controlling, although, to be perfectly honest, he is. He’s a ‘sit down there’ man. No, not there. There. Nearer the stove. Get you warmer quicker. (Even if you’re running a fever, you sit down where he tells you, allowing him to move on to instructing you to read that newspaper, drink up that hot cup of tea and give him your jacket to get the damp out of it.)

He rings me all the time to find out where I am. It’s not that he suspects me of being where I shouldn’t, doing something I oughtn’t. It’s that he suspects me of being where I shouldn’t because I don’t know what I’m at. The minute he comes on, the question is the same.

“Where are you?”

Most of the time, I don’t know but what I do know is he’s going to demand a report on the surroundings, so I tell him about the tree on the right, the Centra on the left, and the housing estate with roundy windows. He says never mind the tree, is there a pub? When I come upon a pub, I give him the name.

“McGubbins?” he repeats. “McGubbins? Never heard of it.”

It’s not that he’s never heard of it neutrally. He’s never heard of it furiously. He snarls his ignorance at me like I was making McGubbins up. He’s being doing this since the day we met and I’ve never worked up the courage to ask him why, as a teetotaller, he asks me the names of pubs. They never mean anything to him. Some day he may identify where I am by what hostelry I’m passing, but so far his score is nil. He does better with churches, but there are more pubs than churches, so he’s like the apocryphal guy looking for his lost car keys; not searching where he dropped them, but around the base of a lamppost because the light is better there.

When he gets cross about me making pubs up, I try to placate him by offering the name of the road I’m on.

“Mirepuddle Lane,” I say.

“What?” he asks, getting madder still.

The only time I ever got to where I was supposed to be going ahead of time, I rang him in triumph and he told me I wasn’t there at all. He said it with such certainty, I doubted it myself.

“But it says Dungarvan on the post office I’m parked in front of.”

“You couldn’t be there,” he said, sweeping the post office aside. “You couldn’t have got there in that time. You’re in the other Dungarvan.”

He was right, and I was dead late for the gig I was supposed to be doing in the correct version of Dungarvan, no offence to the other one. (In theory, this could not happen now, because of by-passes, but I wouldn’t put it past me.) I do have a Sat Nav, but it’s in bits on the floor behind the passenger seat and anyway it was never any good, because it refused to believe in the places I wanted to get to. It could get me to the vicinity, but it’s in the vicinity that being lost afflicts me most. I end up ringing the people I’m supposed to meet. In a baffled way, they say “But you’re just around the corner” as if I was being a moron deliberately.

So, on Christmas Eve, when my mobile phone couldn’t take calls, I knew what would happen to the man in my life. He would ring me several times, getting rattier with each call. He would then text me telling me he was ringing me. He would then decide I’d had a major car crash and would start ringing the gardaí all along the route I was supposed to be on, checking if there was what AA now weirdly call “an incident” on those routes.

It was clear. I would have to pull in to a telephone box and pre-empt all of that. I kept my eye out for phone boxes, only to discover that at some point when I wasn’t looking, they’d taken them all away. I could stop at a pub, except that whenever I go into a pub, something about me disturbs the customers greatly. They look at me with astonishment and fear, as if I was going to explode or spit in their pint.

Then it struck me. It wasn’t just that the phone wouldn’t take or make calls. It wouldn’t do anything and it certainly wouldn’t yield stored data. And I don’t know my husband’s phone number. Neither the number of the mobile nor of the landline at home. In fact, the only number I can rattle off is from a home I haven’t lived in for 30 years. It’s not that I don’t love my husband, sister and son. It’s that I outsourced my brain a while back and didn’t notice at the time. With a fully-powered BlackBerry, I can function. Without a fully-powered BlackBerry, I’m like one of those feral children raised by antelopes: I can walk upright, but that’s about it.

I’m not alone in this. The evidence of wider affliction is ever-present. Whenever I’m on a call, for example, and ask the person at the other end for a telephone number of someone close to them, a moment’s pause ensued before they say that at the end of the call, they’ll text it to me. Which they do, in one of those electronic business card formats I have to learn to do, because it’s impressive enough to cover up the fact that they, personally, in their own head, do not know the number at all. Of course, if they did know it and called it out to me, I wouldn’t be able to memorise it because of suffering outsourced brain syndrome.

On Christmas Eve, the only good thing about running out of BlackBerry juice was that I’d completed my shopping. Because that’s the other thing my phone does: it remembers passwords. Without my phone, I can’t get into my computer, my office, my home or an ATM machine. But, of course, lest I lose the phone and a clever crook picks it up, I have come up with clever obscure made-up names to identify the passwords in my phone. I then forget the made-up pseudonyms, usually at the top of a queue at the cash desk in SuperValu.

I do urgently need to retrieve my brain. I figure Googling “outsourced brain syndrome” might be useful. Once I get power back into the BlackBerry...