Living room special ops

There comes a time when a situation is so overwhelming that you’re not sure whether there is a path forward anymore.

Academically, that moment of truth often comes during I-might-be-DEAD-by-the-end-of-it week, or during finals week. Last weekend, when I lost my phone in my sofa, I learned a couple of important strategies for moving forward in the face of truly trying adversity.

I have a small, weird, little Blackberry that I’m certain no one produces anymore. Despite its overly compact structure, my mother refers to it as my “other limb” for my apparent inability to function without it. Phone dependency could be another whole column — but suffice it to say that after coffee, it’s one of the few things I definitely couldn’t make it through the day without.

Last Wednesday night, my friend and I were enjoying what was certainly a quality television program when I heard my phone vibrate from beneath the cushions. Digging the phone out is a minor inconvenience, but never something to really complain about. It’s like a normal homework assignment: no one loves when it needs to be done, but your friends would probably get annoyed if you whined about it.

After several minutes of devoted digging in the depths of my sofa, it became apparent that my phone had escaped into a tiny crevice inaccessible to the human hand. It turns out that my couch is made out of a wooden frame, which, beneath the arm of the couch, forms a solid and enclosed wood box.

My phone had been consumed by a furniture black box.

For a few minutes, this was hilarious. Then I started crying, and with the help of an electric screwdriver, a hammer, some nails and a hanger, we began to disassemble the couch. What we really needed was a saw, but we were forced to craft a phone-retrieval strategy with what we could find in my high school graduation present tool kit.

Lessons: your friends are your best asset. If you plan on prying couches open, you would be advised to make friends who lift weights, as I did. Also, even the best of friends — the ones who will help you dig your phone out of the couch frame at 1:30 in the morning — might not realize you really need help unless you lay it out there loud and clear.

When you reach the point of tears, you can give up and pay the price. Usually the price of giving up is higher than the price of carrying on: In my case, it would have been a new phone and one of those universally hated “My couch ate my phone — need your number” Facebook groups. But it wasn’t until I realized just how dire my couch-phone debacle really was that I decided to take serious steps towards fixing it.

In any situation in which giving up seems like the only option, remember that there are 100 solutions to every problem, and if you love something enough, you’ll find a way to dig it out of a sofa.


E-mail: swilensk@indiana.edu