How lucky we are

A phone frustration leads to inspiration

My phone broke this week. I have not been so frustrated in a long time. I lost all my contacts and my essential text messages. I bought a replacement phone, which was not working properly with android auto. I could not speak into the car, instead, I had to pull over whenever I needed to enter an address or even switch a song. This immediately grew very frustrating as that is 95% of what I do on my phone (the other 90% is spent wasting time).

After a while of having to pull over pretty frequently (I drive a lot for my job), I started getting really mad. But then I gave a hitch to some bochrim with kosher phones and I started laughing, as I once too had a kosher phone and was so pumped when I got my first kosher phone with waze and how convenient it was. I started laughing even harder, as I remembered from my childhood my father digging out the maps and the atlas as we went on road trips (yes I am that old). How we inevitably we would get into traffic jams and how we would then go off the highway for a “shortcut”. How we would get inevitably get lost for hours (this happened every trip - literally) and then we would have to dig out the maps and the atlas from the glove compartment and realize we had driven in the wrong direction for the past three hours. I then thought of how my car now has air conditioning and how in the past my old car didn’t (just last year!). I thought of how people would travel by stagecoach and it took them days of the baal agala shouting at the horse and the uncomfortableness of the ride and getting stuck in the mud on dangerous streets. And here I am in 2025 getting angry because I cannot talk to the electronic map in my comfortable 328 horsepower car.

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are.