Zen and the Art of Maintaining a FrankenPhone

Water. Water everywhere.  Yeah, that's South Mississippi right now.  And for those of us in the Pearl River Basin, there's a lot of water.  But I'm lucky, really.  My yard always floods; it's wetland, so standing water is a regular occurrence.  It never reaches the house; it's just super-soggy underfoot.....well, sometimes worse than that.  The local frogs like to remind me of that with their daily chorus about the depth of the water:   knee-deep, knee-deep, knee-deep. 

The real problem right now is that the Flood Alerts have reached my cellphone; they have it in a death grasp, and they just won't let go.  Even though I've turned off all the Alerts on my phone, even though I've silenced everything, even though I've set everything back to zero, even though I've turned my phone off for as long as 12 hours at a time.....the Alerts won't quit.  They are still waking my phone every 60 seconds.  No sound comes out; my cell just lights up every minute for 15 seconds, and it can't be locked. And it drains the battery within hours.  It can seem a bit maddening.

This has happened before with other alerts but usually the problem resolves itself.  This time, 15-second flashes have been going on for days.  That's way too long.  So, finally, I called tech support at my cell service provider to discuss the fact that my phone had morphed into Chicken Little, and I talked to a couple of nice technicians who really tried to help but couldn't.  I had, in fact, already done everything they could think of to tell my to do, and I had done it all more than once.  They were surprised that I was so pleased and happy with their service, that I had no complaint, even though they could do nothing to assist.

But here's the deal:  if you've done everything you can and you know there's nothing more, you can be at peace and you can be grateful for knowing what the situation is.  Getting fussed won't change stuff.  Life isn't perfect; expecting it to be so only causes pain.  That's why it's good to learn to accept, to see the Wabi-Sabi--the beauty of imperfection--in situations when there's just nothing more to be done. 

Wabi-Sabi.  I can live with my obnoxious Chicken Little cell.  It still does what I need it to do--call, text.  I don't need a phone upgrade and I don't want to pay for extra service.  It's just a quirk.  If you've done everything you can, you live with quirks.  No big.  And it makes for an amusing story when you have to explain why your phone flashes continually.

Knee-deep water (well, it's probably that deep to the frogs) and a FrankenPhone.
Life is still good.