Apocalypse? Now?

I have officially lost my cellphone*. I am very concerned.

I am concerned for several reasons. The first reason is that I spent most of my very frustrating Friday doing my best to sign away my soul to the holiday retail industry, and on every application form, my preferred form of contact is 'by phone'. While the chances that someone would hire me at this late date are fairly slim, so long as my phone is gone I will be convinced that there are messages on it from Toys R Us, HMV, and Walmart, all offering me unrealistically high wages to help them stack boxes into colourful pyramids for the month of December (that's what happens in the retail industry, right?).

The second reason I am worried about my cellphone disappearing is that, as I now live in a place where there is no landline, I really have few options when it comes to phoning people, or having people phone me, and I am sure that this week will be a vitally important phone-call week for me, for some reason**.

Third is the very perplexing circumstances under which my cellphone disappeared. I know I had it on the way to work. I was in Shoppers Drugmart buying a variety of items meant to keep the bakery bleach water from peeling the skin off my hands, and I took my phone out to check the time and it said 6:54 on it. So I know that at 6:54 this morning, I still had my phone. Then, things get hazy. Somewhere between paying for hand lotion and turning on the oven at work, my phone just disappeared.

What is even more confusing is that I have reason to believe I was sleep-text-message-reading last night. The details of this are far too long and confusing to get into here***, but I am convinced that my subconscious mind was playing some fun tricks on me last night. Ergo, I cannot trust my early-morning memory, meaning I'm not actually entirely certain if I checked the time on my phone this morning. I could have hallucinated it. Maybe my brain already knew my phone was gone and was so concerned about it that I day-dreamed that I still had it! And checked the time! And also read a few text-messages that were new but had somehow already been mysteriously opened.

Seeing as how I no longer trust my own brain, I can't rule out the possibility that I left my phone under my bed (checked) in the fridge (checked), in a snowbank (like in Fargo. Did not check, unlike that confused lady who thought Fargo was real), in the oven (please, no), in a cupcake (I would like to thank my roommate for that suggestion), in the hands of a greedy Shoppers employee (checked. twice. should have looked more closely for shifty eyes), hidden amongst the packages of rubber gloves in Shoppers' Aisle 2, or really anywhere else in Winnipeg by now. Now I'm not going to get a job over the holidays. Instead I will be forced to sit in an armchair inventing bizarre Christmas-themed drinks using ingredients my roommate left lying around carelessly--like vanilla or diet coke or organic shampoo--and watching pirated Christmas movies on my laptop. All because of this stupid phone. Oh dear what shall I do?

*as opposed to three days ago when I 'lost my phone' and it was hiding in a fold of my duvet the entire time.

**Wow. That's all one sentence.

***really, it involves an argument that I thought was with one person but was actually with another, an apology text-message, a cat, and a dream about me being an award-winning poet with a collection of 2-foot-tall Disney Princess dolls.