Death by cell phone

I knew I'd come to rely more and more on my smartphone, but I didn't realize how dependent I'd become on it until one day this week when I got home for lunch and realized I didn't have it. Looked all over the house, looked in the car, looked in the office when I got back to work. I finally did find it -- it had slipped out of my pants pocket and down beside the driver's seat. Whew! That was three hours of near panic. I felt like this guy must have felt like just before -- well, before his phone dependency ended:

A Palatine man was crushed to death in a trash compactor as he searched for his missing cell phone, authorities said.

Roger Mirro, 56, told a neighbor in his apartment complex around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday that he may have dropped his phone down the garbage chute, authorities said. Mirro asked for a key to the trash room in the lower level parking garage, they said.

[. . .]

After talking to neighbors, officers searched the parking garage and the trash room, where they discovered a lock had been removed from the door. They saw a ladder propped up alongside the trash compactor and Mirro's body inside it, police said.

An autopsy determined Mirro died of crushing injuries caused by the compactor, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.

Stoeckel called the death “a terrible accident.”

If you're preparing a sermon, lecture or other diatribe about the way technology is crushing our creativity or spirit or something, feel free to use this as a metaphorical anectdote. Can't have enough of those.

And, for God's sake, keep track of your phones.