A side effect of day light savings ending is that I wake up an hour before normal for a few days. Which is great, since I get an early start to the day’s activities. As I was leaving home this morning, Sharmila asked if I could drop my stuff at the laundry’s. I just remapped my morning in a jiffy – you know important things like what is the nearest Starbucks to the laundry, where is the nearest park to run in, where is the nearest LA Fitness – all those first world problems that consume me early in the morning and grabbed the laundry bag.

A short uneventful ride later, I was there at the laundry drive in. Not a single soul was there, Outside. Or for that matter inside. I could see that the door was open and I could hear somebody working inside but that dratted pipe that I drove over that should have triggered a bell, did not. Being an engineer, I was engrossed immediately by what could be the problem – loose connection? shorted contact? forgot to switch the bell on? A simpler – and arguably smarter – person would have just walked thru the front door. Not me. I kept going around in circles to trigger the bell. Finally, tired of that, I just keep driving forward and backward trampling the pipe with abandon. Even the bell got tired of me and at one point condescended to ring! “Loose connection”, I concluded. “You or me?”, the bell must have chuckled, if it could chuckle, that is.

Next problem! The lady who I normally deal with was not there. She would usually just take the clothes and shoo me away. She knows my name and did not need me to repeat any details. But today, it was her husband. And he asked a seemingly innocuous question – “What is your phone number”?

I say innocuous. Far from it. I had to give him my home phone number! No less! In these days of mobile phones, how would I know what my land line number is? I cannot even remember the mobile numbers – given the ever ubiquitous “Contact” lists in every digital device within a spitting distance of me that keep synching with each other. And I could not even remember if I have ever called my own land line phone number in the past.

After some awkward moments of staring each other, I proferred the easy part … “678…..”. And then I started mumbling. Fortunately, my Indian accent met the Korean ears and he immediately said “Wait wait… slow down….”. Good for me, I said. Some more time to remember as I slowly said “6…. 7…. 8….”.

That just resulted in some more staring at each other – which, regrettably, did not help matters much. Finally, I gave up and started fiddling with my phone. As I looked for my own contact details, iPhone reported that no such person existed. Confused, I searched for Sharmila. Apparently, she did not exist either. BTW, I found out later that some iPhones are having this bug with the latest iOS update. At that point of time though matters could not get any worse.

The biggest worry going thru in my mind at that time was “Am I finally losing my mind?”.

Eventually, I did manually search the phone and got our home phone number from Sharmila’s contact details. And that is when all my doubts about whether I am losing my mind was set to rest.

I certainly am.

Apparently, I did not even get the area code right! Our number starts 7-7-0…