You know you're too reliant on your phone when you cry in your car over lost phone numbers

Sometime last week, my phone had an alert on it saying I had low storage space. Annoyed at the thought that I would have to go to Verizon to get it fixed, I postponed going for a few days. However, when my phone stopped receiving emails, I had to suck it up and go to the store.

The Verizon worker told me there was a glitch in the latest system update that was telling my phone it had less storage than it really had - so he had to do a hard reboot. Meaning, my entire phone would be wiped clean. I would have to download all my apps and set everything back up. Ok, not a big deal. I could handle that. However, what I couldn't handle is my contact list being wiped. So, I specifically asked if my contact list could be backed up. He promised me it would. He even said, "It looks like your contacts are being backed up in your gmail."

I should have interjected and said, "well make sure, because I don't think all my phone numbers have been synced in my gmail." But I didn't. For whatever reason, I didn't. And now I am kicking myself.

Because when I got my phone back and was walking to my car, I opened up my "People". And well, the only people that were in my list were an FHE group I had created 3 years ago when I had The Worst Calling in the church (I talk about it here too).

Bad words were said.

Many of them.

And then tears were shed.

Even more of them.

I lost over 700 phone numbers. I got back to work and called Nicole in tears. She tried to help me restore the numbers, but for some reason they were never synced in my gmail contacts list.

I know I will never use most of those numbers again. But I honestly feel like I lost a huge part of my life.

The best part of this whole story is when I emailed people and asked them to send me a text with their name so I could have their number again, I got this from my mom:

"Boo Hoo. Mommy and Daddy live at 801-xxx-xxxx and Mommy's cell is 801-xxx-xxxx."

This was disturbing on my many levels. 1) The fact that my mom referred to herself and my father as "mommy and daddy" and 2) because she thought she needed to remind me of my home phone number. That is like the one phone number I will remember until I get Alzheimer's and die. I then realized that out of all the phone numbers in my phone, I only knew 6 of them by heart. 1) Dad's cell 2) Mom's cell 3) my parents home 4) Hailey 5) Katelyn and 6) Kristine. Katelyn and Kristine get the honorary friend memorization because they have had the same numbers since we first had cell phones 11 year ago.

How many numbers can you remember off the top of your head? If it's as few as mine, you better back up your phone contacts now. Or else you'll be crying in your car one day when you realize you can't call anyone to help you because you lost your phone contacts.