Has this ever happened to you: You go out without your phone and find yourself deprived of power, as if you were Iron Man stripped off his suit?

Well, it has happened to me before. On a Sunday last year, I left my phone at home when I went to see a movie and visit my friend. I had the misgiving all day that I wouldn’t be able to complete the quest without bumps. I was incommunicado, incapable of finding out what my friends were up to, and couldn’t figure out the best route to my friend’s place. The sight of everyone else staring at or typing frantically on a phone made me more uneasy, because I was worried if something important happened, I would be the last one to know.

When I met my friend, he generously offered me his spare phone – a Nokia 2626, which he described as a classic. That puzzled me because I didn’t understand why he put a “classic” phone haphazardly in the bottom drawer of his computer desk. Then he proclaimed in a I-saved-your-day manner: “I will lend you my prepaid SIM card and then you can call or SMS anyone later.”

I was certain he was trying to be funny, because last time I checked, only banks would send SMSes. Besides, who still has the ability to remember anyone’s number other than his own?

On the bus back home, I whiled away the time by playing Snake – a game on the Nokia phone that renders horrifying graphics and requires four hard keys to control. Half of the time I was wondering: How did I get tired of Angry Birds, Temple Run and Candy Crush?

After getting back home, I immediately grabbed my phone and counted the number of news alerts, tweets, Facebook posts, Whatsapp messages and emails I missed. It turned out that the world survived another day without a catastrophe, and none of my friends bothered to ask me: “Where were you?”

Heaving a sigh of relief, I pondered the question: How did I get so attached to my phone? There was a time when my phone couldn’t do half of the things that can be easily handled by a smart device, yet I lived through those days just fine. Then every new phone I bought was smarter than the old one, and my dependency on the phone kept growing. Now, it has become my inseparable sidekick.

Since that harrowing experience, I have made it a habit to check that my phone is in the pocket every time I step out of the door. I don’t ever want to go out like Captain Kirk without Spock by my side again.