Just over a year ago, I spent 45 minutes opening several new bank accounts in reaction to our mail being stolen.

During my time in the bank branch, I let the baby play with my Nokia 5165 cell phone to keep him quiet. He slobbered all over it. Well, I suppose animals "slobber"; babies drool. Whatever it's called, the phone got soggy, severely soggy. And he chewed the power button, pressing it beneath the faceplate and breaking the support ring on the underside.

When it came time to call my husband at work for his fax number, my cell phone would not power on. No matter, a faxed signature wouldn't really do, so I would return the following day with the paperwork all signed by him for the joint accounts.

I thought that the baby had ruined the phone for good. How to retrieve all of the numbers in my address book, most of which aren't stored elsewhere?

Overnight, the phone dried out and I was able to power it on reliably. I had to do some fiddling under the faceplate to make the rubber power button stand up to pressing.

In a panic and a flurry, I jotted down all of the names and numbers in my address book onto a few pages in my Franklin Planner. (I've been a tediously neurotic Franklin Planner user for more than ten years. I'm at the stage in my life where I must design my own pages and layout, and Franklin Covey makes it easy online!) Then I used the phone without incident over the year.

A fortnight ago, I received my next 12 months' supply of custom pages, starting in Sept. I spent a few minutes shifting things around in my compact-sized planner, out with the old, in with the new.

Part of "the old" was that list of names and numbers that I had jotted down last summer. And today I find that my cell phone's battery will not hold a charge. The saving grace, I suppose, is that I had decided to shred my list of names and numbers. Therefore, the pages rest in the "to-be-shredded" bin and were not discarded last, last weekend during the major recycling trip. Even so, the phone powers on when plugged in, so I jotted down my names and numbers a second time just to be sure because I have "expectant mommy" brain cells right now. IOW, maybe I just chucked 'em after all.

Is this a good time to prune people from my address book?

We've talked about getting new phones for about a year now. I signed up for this particular service about seven years ago when AT&T Wireless (AWS) was aggressively enrolling AT&T employees. I thought that the employee discount resulted in a decent plan for me. But now I see that Cingular will charge $5 / month service fee for non-GSM customers.