Yesterday, Thursday, Joey had to work.  I got a new cell phone in the mail and while I was sitting at the doctor’s office (I’ve been dizzy for 4 days) I put all the phone numbers from my old phone into my new phone.  (That saved me $10, I’ll have you know.)

Joey’s new cell phone had come a day or so before mine had, and about the second thing out of my mouth, once we saw the new phone, was, “Can I set your old phone on fire when we get home?!”

“Umh, no.” Joey said flatly.

“Please?” I asked…

“No way. It’s wasteful and destructive.” I could tell I’d better quit pestering for the day, it was going to get me absolutely nowhere.

“Stink.”

As soon as Joey left yesterday, my evil little brain began planning. He said I couldn’t set his phone on fire…but he didn’t say anything about mine. (By default I should have assumed that, no, I still should not set my phone on fire, but I chose not to follow that train of thought.)

I began gathering my tools.
I figured I needed lots of matches (to give it that little poof of flame every so often), my phone (obviously), toilet paper (for ignition), tape (to tape matches to the phone),

After I dumped those matches out, I realized that it had been a really stupid idea. It took me forever to get them all back in the box so they’d all fit, they all had to go a certain direction. I will not be doing that again. Ever.

I would have taped googley eyes all over my phone, but decided against it. I figured the phone would have enough trouble burning as it was.

I told Henry to stay inside and keep out of trouble, and I carried my loot outside. I had already decided against doing this on the parking lot (I didn’t want Landlord to catch me), so I decided the best thing to do was to do it in the grill. I had put a call in to The Kid about 1o minutes prior to this, to ask him if I should take out the battery, but he never called back. So I left the battery in. (I realize now that this was probably not my brightest moment.)

I doused the phone, newspaper and matches with lighter fluid. I then moved the container of lighter fluid as far away from the grill as possible (I’m not a complete idiot) and set the edge of the newspaper on fire. A dry, non-lighter fluided edge.

This was the result:

I thought it was pretty sweet…but it did smell terrible.

The phone burned for about 10 minutes and began to make some strange hissing, popping, buzzing type noises. I particularly enjoyed the way the screen looked as it melted, it got all colorful and oozy. The keypad looked kind of like a gray shiny marshmallow that was burning up.

Joey called about 20 minutes after I had cleaned up my mess.

“Hey, what are you doing?” He asked me, probably assuming that I was cleaning, watching Anne of Avonlea, or reading a book.

“Um….Iwassettingmyphoneonfire,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“I set my phone on fire…You didn’t say I couldn’t set my phone on fire!”

“Aaaaugh! I was going to give the phones to Best Buy, they’ll reprogram them to dial 911 for old people.”

I began to feel slightly guilty, but nonetheless quite satisfied with my phone-burning exploit.

Joeh sighed in the background. “I assume you took the battery out first?”

“Well….no.” I said.

“Those give off dangerous chemicals!” Joey squwaked. It seemed like now was as good a time as any to tell him that I’d burned the phone in the grill.

He made some strange, indistinguishable noises. “I hope you’re going to clean that up,” he said.

“Well, I’ll get all dirty, and besides, I don’t really know how.”

Fortunately, Joey laughed at me. “OK, I’ll clean it up when I get home. You’re crazy, you know that?”

Of course I know that. Why else would I set my phone on fire?