Today was an interesting way to celebrate the first game of the new indoor soccer season. We lost 3-1 (our players got tired and the other team got a couple crappy goals), but the score was one of the less significant events that occurred during the game. The most significant one… will cost some money. The most significant event on the way home… got me some money back.
I picked up a minor injury during the game (as usual)—someone kicked the inside of my right leg just above the ankle—and I haven’t the slightest idea when it happened (as usual). I do remember what happened with about five minutes left in the game: I tried a header that went horribly awry.
Maybe part of my problem is that I wear sport goggles, but I’ve never been good at using my forehead to bounce the ball in the direction I want it to go. (Big frames, smaller space on my forehead to use… but that’s beside the point.) I usually end up jumping up and hitting the ball with the top of my head, at which point it’ll go in whatever direction it wants. This time, I wanted to do it the right way.
The ball was coming down at kind of a low angle, so I had time to get myself set, my feet planted and my head pointed in the direction that I wanted the ball to go. Except the ball got too close to the ground by the time my head got to it, so it hit the nosepiece on my goggles instead.
Now, I’ve whipped those goggles off and thrown them in disgust, I’ve had them jarred so they sat at a crooked angle on my nose and I’ve had them smooshed against my face, leaving giant smears of sweat across the lenses. Hell, I’ve even done a face-plant with them on—I was running down an indoor field shoulder to shoulder with some guy, I kicked the ball off to the side and he shoved me from behind. If I hadn’t been wearing those goggles, the carpet on the stadium floor would have taken half my face off. (As it was, I lost a few layers of skin off the top of my right kneecap, so for the next two weeks, I couldn’t cross my legs and had to keep adjusting my jeans while I was sitting down because it was rubbing against the rug burn.)
With all that history of abuse to my sport goggles, not once has the frame split in two and popped off my head in the middle of a game. And that’s what happened today.
I was really confused for a moment when I looked down and saw two halves of the goggles held together by the head strap lying on the turf. When it finally clicked, I picked them up and kept playing for another minute or two—my vision sucks, but I could see the blurry white dot moving in front of me. Once the ball went up towards the other goal, I ran towards the sideline yelling for a sub. No one moved—they were all watching our players up by the goal. I was actually off the field before someone went in for me and I stood off to the side for the rest of the game.
I checked out the damage when the game was over. The goggles have hinges on both sides of the nosepiece so they can flex a little—when I did that face plant a couple years ago, it snapped one, so there were two good hinges on one side and just one on the other. (I brought them back to the place I bought them and got a free replacement pair—all the people working there kept asking what happened because they thought those goggles were “indestructible.”) That small amount of damage was caused by a face plant. After that header this afternoon… it snapped the plastic. The hinges are fine—the frame is broken. Since I doubt I’ll be able to find the receipt from so many years ago, I’ll have to pay for a new pair.
Consequently, I was a little disgruntled on the way home, but not entirely. Yesterday, Brent gave me his old cell phone since he bought a new one recently. Apparently, Sprint was having this deal where he could have cashed in the old one for fifty bucks, but he thought it’d be more worthwhile to give it to me instead of getting the money. I happily accepted the gift and brought it in to a Sprint store to get it changed to my phone number, access my voice mail, etc.
I got there, they made some minor adjustments and that was it. Seemed kind of anticlimactic, really. Then I asked what I should do with my old phone. I didn’t need it for anything—I’ve got my new phone, it’s set to my number, I can check my messages… what else is there? The girl working there said I could bring it home and transfer all the numbers from one Address Book to the other.
I had covered that the day before: I was at a friend’s birthday party a few months ago and one guy who was there went to a concert with a mosh pit later on. At one point in the pit, he looked down and saw half of his phone on the ground, crushed under God knows how many bouncing feet. All those numbers… gone. So on Saturday afternoon, I finally got around to writing down all of the information from my Address Book (I had no idea I was so popular until I used a pencil, paper and a few severe hand cramps to complete the list).
So I really didn’t need the old one for anything else. “Is there something you can do with it?” As it turned out, there was: that $50 credit that Brent could have received for turning in his phone applied to mine, too. As a result, I kept his old cell phone and we still got the fifty bucks from Sprint. But wait, there’s more!
The biggest reason that getting that money is really cool is because when I joined Brent’s calling plan as an additional line, I got a really cheap phone that only did basic stuff. I had no idea I’d use it as much as I do now, but still… The price? $29.95. The credit for returning it to the Spring store? $50. I made a profit by getting Brent’s phone! Capitalism rocks!
So this afternoon, I’ve spent a significant amount of time putting names and numbers into my Address Book and getting a feel for my new phone. It’s been kinda fun adjusting the settings, listening to the ringers and alarms, putting stuff into the calendar… maybe I’m just easily amused. But I’ve already decided one thing—when I’m playing soccer, this sucker is getting buried someplace safe. If it somehow gets snapped in two, you will never see a Sprint employee look at it and say, “I thought it was indestructible!”
