You’re a grown-ass woman, and it’s no one’s business why you can’t return their call right now. Maybe you’re busy. Maybe you have a rigorous call-screening process and your mom is just not cutting it right now. Maybe you are in a series of consecutive business meetings at all times, and just don’t have a spare minute to call your bestie back. Or maybe you dropped your phone in the toilet again.

I have had a cell phone for a long time now—I got my first Nokia block number at age 13, in 2001—but I also remember a time where, in order to make a phone call you needed a coin, a written or memorized number, and an available wall-mounted, handheld phone. To take a photo you needed a camera with film in it and to do a Facebook you needed a time machine. So next time you’re annoyed with your phone’s battery life or are complaining about having a blackberry and not an iPhone, remember trying to call your mom after figure skating practice and not having enough change/waiting in a line of other small humans all trying to call their moms. Louis CK has some important thoughts on this. Less than 40 years ago, if you showed someone the phone you have now, they might legitimately wonder whether or not you were a sorceress. It would have been the ’70s or so, so they wouldn’t have burnt you at the stake, but they might have called you “groovy” which is almost as bad. Still, there are downsides to everything, even magical, glowing boxes full of information and our friends’ live, real time faces and thoughts. As usual, we will talk through how to deal with some of these, starting right now.

…Okay, now.

Password protect, dummies!
This is not 2001. Your phone is more than a phone—it is a receptacle of your emails, various social media accounts, contact information, banking information, weird pics of your face that you made look old with an app you spent too much money on, and other sundry personal details that should be yours and yours alone. Put a password on your phone and back up your information in case of loss. Maybe install one of those phone tracking apps as well. Make sure your friends and loved ones do this, too—there’s literally no worse feeling than watching your sext go from “delivered” to “read” after getting a FB message from your beau informing you that he left his phone in the back of a cab. S/O to that cab driver, currently in possession of a truly terrifying number of pictures of my butt, and who sent me back a winky face before taking the battery out of that phone forever. #cute

Save numbers with thoughtful details to help you remember who people are
“One missed call from: Jen, SDTC Bad Bitch in Charge”
“Two new emails from: Dave (U of T student, met outside Saving Gigi)”
“One new message from: EMILY DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT HE IS THE DEVIL.”

Know your limit, play within it
Every time I did something terrible to my phone—drop it, fall on it, get it somehow covered in blood (it happened)—I used to think to myself, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” For a while, I was right. I had to live with the shittiest, most weirdly long flip phone (flip phone!) that was missing a back and which had a faulty 7 key. It was impossible to lose or break. If you are constantly leaving your phone at restaurants or stepping on it in the night or whatever, maybe you need to accept that you don’t deserve a $400 phone. You can’t take care of it. This is like the “take care of this egg” experiment from high school. Or at least from television high school, which is almost the same. You’ve crushed the egg, and you and Dreamboat Jimmy are unfit parents. Get a terrible brick of a phone and live with that for a year, or until you’ve learned to value your own possessions.

Top tips: don’t keep it in your bra if you are in the bathroom—you’ll drop it in the toilet. Don’t put it down on a table or counter-top without first checking to see if that table or counter-top is quietly damp—you’ll water damage it into oblivion. Don’t allow a baby to play with your phone unsupervised—it will be in its diaper or mouth (or BOTH) by the time you get back. Don’t text in the bath. Don’t use your phone as a doorstop. Don’t play large-scale dominoes with a bunch of phones. Don’t try to make a phone call from the top of a cliff after you’ve just lotion-ed up your hands. You get the idea.

Carry your charger
Or buy one of those chargey cases. Having your phone die can feel like a full-scale traumatic event, and at the very least is extremely inconvenient in this day and age where we are all supposed to be fully contactable 24/sevs. Don’t get stuck without Google Maps in a new ‘hood or without the ability to Snapchat the best dog you have ever seen. Just use your brain and keep your phone juiced up. This is an especially important point for boys: Hey, boys. Charge your damn phones. How are we supposed to holla at you if your holla-machines are down?! #holla

Take off that thing where your phone loads all your photos onto whatever computer you plug it into.
Never rush frantically to close your friend’s laptop again. The freedom!

Keep it together in public
You don’t need to scream your life story into your cell on the bus. TBH, the bus isn’t really a place for phone conversations anyway. TBVH, I’d prefer if we did away with talking on the phone altogether. It’s 2013, just send me a text and call it a day. You’re more direct via text, have a record of the conversation in case you need to reference it at a later date, and it makes life a lot easier to communicate for those of us who are incapable of sounding like a normal human after being woken up by a phone. Also, for future ref, “…did I just wake you up?” is the rudest thing you can ask a person you have clearly just woken up at 3pm on a Monday. Some of us set our own schedules and some of us need a midday nap just to keep going in this crazy, messed up world. Now send me an email and let me get back to it.

Well, it’s almost nap time. Just gotta plug in this phone and hit snooze on the touchscreen of my brain. Goodnight/call me/do not call me but do send a text, I love to text!

Follow Monica on Twitter: @monicaheisey