The Mental Math of a Dying Phone Battery

I do my best impression of important mathematicians like Newton, Einstein, Pascal, and Archimedes. I do the mental math. I crunch the numbers. I carry the one. I check my addition and subtraction. I dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Okay, that last one isn’t math, but I do it anyway for good luck.

I go back to the beginning and try to solve the problem, but I keep coming back to the same answer and it’s not a good one. Here’s what I mean: I’ve had my cell phone for eight years. The battery is slowly dying. I charge it overnight to 100 percent. First thing in the morning, I check my flight info, and within minutes the battery is down to 75 percent. Where did it go? Who stole my battery charge?

Solving the Math

Ten more minutes, and it might be down to 45 percent. I’ve considered going to the local police station to file my version of a missing persons report. I kid, but you get the drift—it’s just gone. It up and vanished into thin air. Here one minute, gone the next.

Two days later, I’m sitting on the couch with my wife watching a movie. It’s a quiet night. Within minutes, my phone battery plunges to 10 percent. Where’d the power go? The phone is having a busier night out on the town than I am.

Did it swipe right and have two hot dates first with Siri and then Alexa? Was it using Apple Pay to cover the cost of a movie and dinner at an expensive restaurant? I noticed some different music on Spotify. Was it playing Barry White’s deep baritone or Marvin Gaye’s smooth tenor voice to set the mood? Who knows?

I demand to know where my smartphone has been. I threaten it with a “grounding.” I point my finger and say, “Buster, you’re in for it now!” It laughs at me. Like I’m going to leave my phone home when I leave the house. Yea right, like that would ever happen. I tell it that I’m going to give it more chores, more apps to download. It says, “bring it on.”

Yes, I’m jealous—but that’s the one answer I can never get from my phone. The news of the day? No problem. The name of the actor who played the Professor on Gilligan’s Island? Of course—a quick Google search spits out Russell Johnson’s name. But why my phone is dying so quickly?

The only answer I get back with any regularity: Syntax error or Empty Set. In the math world, that means shoulders shrugged, hands up in the air, and no answer.

Remember Paper Tickets?

Of course, I can’t help but think back to when we lived without smartphones. A phone was connected to a landline and used to call people—that was it. As comedian Derrick Stroup likes to point out, if we wanted to call a girl from class and maybe even ask her out, we had to call the “house phone” and run the risk of her father picking up. Shoot me now!

Heck, it gets better, I remember old black, unbreakable rotary phones. We didn’t call people while picking out produce. We printed out MapQuest directions. We carried paper tickets. When we saw a funny video of a cat, dog, or baby, we saw it watching TV. We didn’t text an emoji to a friend; we asked them over coffee the next day if they saw the same TV show.

We didn’t have to fret over smartphone batteries.

Vegas or Bust!

Now, I’m constantly doing the mental math, trying to calculate how many minutes of life my phone has left. Do you think Calculus or Abstract Algebra are hard? No way. They’re a piece of cake compared to figuring out battery life. There’s a million different variables and variations—each affecting the lifespan in a good or bad way.

Some days I play it conservative. I’ll opt to sit quietly by myself and twiddle my thumbs instead of playing a mobile game just to make sure I have the juice I need later in the day. I’m like the Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott from Star Trek, reporting back to the bridge, “I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captain!”

And then on other days to keep the Star Trek analogy, I’m like Captain James T. Kirk in danger telling Lieutenant Sulu to max out the Starship Enterprise to warp speed. I roll the dice, take a devil-may-care attitude, and see how far we can get today.

Woohoo, let’s live dangerously and see what the Battery Gods decide to give me today!

Living on Life Support

Yes, yes, I’ve read all the warnings and announcements about battery life. I even check out all the conspiracy theories about how tech companies release new updates specifically designed to kill off our storage and battery life.

It’s like a bad TV whodunit where the part-time detective and solves the crime, shouting “Murderer, murderer, murderer!” as the well-to-do business man tries to flee the scene only to be stopped by chasing police. Think Jessica Fletcher, the fictional mystery author from the show Murder, She Wrote or Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez in Only Murders in the Building.

I’ve gotten smarter. I carry a power adapter everywhere. I enter a room like a bodyguard scanning for threats, except I’m scanning for wall outlets. Traveling though has scarred me. I’m constantly searching for outlets that work. Will that one work? Or is it going to leave me stranded?

I cackle like a crazed lunatic. I’ve got power.

It’s a Real Thing

I’m not alone in worrying about my phone leaving me stranded. I looked it up. “Battery anxiety”—the dread people feel when their power drops below a certain percentage—is an actual recognized phenomenon.

A survey from Vodafone found that most people start to panic when their battery drops to 28 percent. (Here’s a real life challenge: who gets more anxious: the driver whose car falls below a quarter tank of gas or the smartphone user whose battery falls below 15 percent? Oh life’s challenges!) The survey got better: it found that 46 percent of respondents admitted their phone dies at least once a week.

So yes, the struggle is real.

Reality Hits Me Smack-Dab in the Face

I joke about going off the grid, but reality hits: I need my phone for the basics. No phone, no boarding pass. No phone, no hotel reservation. No concert ticket. No contacts. No phone, no anything. Without it, my trip—and my life—comes to a grinding halt.

The smartphone has gradually absorbed our wallets, our keys, and our travel passes. That dread isn’t irrational or vain—it’s a realistic reaction to relying on a rechargeable cell for literally everything. How would I ever get anything done?

Who’s with me? Leave a comment before my phone dies.

Oh yes, I need my phone. And yes, I’ll probably be in the market for a new one in the not-too-distant future! Yikes!

Images by Pexels.