Exciting! That was what I thought the world was going to be when I was put into my community. Each one of us had a specific duty and our design, was such that, wouldn’t let us assume a different role. It was better this way, we were focused tools in the division of labor. Arm, he was the brains, would be directing all of the traffic in the community. Not one piece of information was allowed to be routed around him. But, well, that is because he was a processor. I liked Arm. That was because we both had important tasks. Some of the others, I don’t want to use names, weren’t that important. They were the roads that the information passed by. But, Arm and I, we were vital. That was the problem, we were vital. Our owner, some of the other components called it father, was not the best at caring for his phones.
When we were sold the salesman said, “John, you gotta stop killing these phones. That is your third one in two years!”
With a boisterous laugh, “Please, these things are obsolete by the time I break ‘em. I’m just saving myself some frustration.” With a slight chuckle he continued, “Never had one of them freeze on me.”
The salesmen was shaking his head while smiling, “That’s because you throw them at the wall the second they lock up.”
With no air of concern, “Damn right!”
At first, Arm was concerned but I remained confident that it would be different. We were the best, every component was perfect. Then we saw his car, well I saw it and the cameras too. The rest of the components were unaware that we had been purchased by someone with disposable income (he owned a Ferrari in the upper Midwest). Wait! I am being unfair to him because there are many people without disposable income that upgrade their devices regularly. It just seemed to be a bad omen.
Really, the bad omen was when he didn’t buy a case or a protective screen for me. Within the first week I had a small chip. Luckily, he didn’t notice. For about a year everything was great: Arm directing traffic, me displaying the results from his hard work, and the cameras taking selfies while John was at the club. But, in a drunken moment, another man bumped into him and knocked us to the ground. It was a corner hit, and that simple chip exploded into a spider web of destruction.
Our “father” noticed and quickly proceeded to get into a fight. Once home, he went to bed. That was when my own personal hell descended. Everyone blamed me for their deaths. It was eleven hours of blame, and it all landed on my shoulders. They were right though, in the morning he shut the phone down and placed me in a cabinet. Later, he was back with a new model, but I was happily chatting with the old ones.