Last week, out of pure boredom, my best friend and I decided to swap phones for a whole day. We obviously clued in our parents, siblings and significant other that if they wanted to reach me to text/call her and vice versa. So I sanitized my phone in my LED phone cleaner, drove over to her house, had her sanitize her phone and then the swap began.
Going into this day I wasn’t sure how or where to begin. Obviously, some posts on Instagram and Snapchat were going to be included, but what else was going to be figured out once messages and whatever else came in on her phone. The one thing that I thought would be most interesting was to see if going to different schools and being a year apart in age would make a difference in the number of messages received in a day.
So following my usual Friday routine, after swapping phones I got my coffee from Dunkin. However, my friend is a member of the Dunkin’ rewards so I used her app so she would get the points. Don’t worry I messaged my phone so she would Venmo herself from my phone for the drink.
Driving around with her phone linked to my car’s Bluetooth was a major upside because I was able to listen to music I wouldn’t usually listen to myself. So I spent some of my day jamming out to classics artists like The Beatles, Elton John, Queen and David Bowie.
I did have a good time posting embarrassing pictures of her on Instagram and definitely bothering her followers with the spam. I also did an anonymous question sticker on Snapchat, revealing that more than a few people wanted to take her on dates. Her boyfriend wasn’t too pleased but obviously, it was just innocent fun for me.
Our one minor, or maybe major, the mistake with doing this was we forgot to tell her boss. So when she needed to reach my friend she kept texting the phone I had. I called her and texted her to explain that in order to reach her she needed to text my phone number. For some reason, she just wasn’t getting it and thought we were playing some humorless joke on her. I think we were getting very close to my friend getting fired… oops, but she just used my phone to message her boss and that seemed to be fine.
Other than a few Snapchat messages during the day, I began to realize that, like me, she also didn’t get many people reaching out during the day. I guess like best friends would we’re the other person one really hears from during the week. I mean how can we blame anyone for this, not that we’re all working really hard in college, have jobs and are trying to focus on grad school.
After a full day, we met back up around 10 p.m. to swap our phones back, luckily she didn’t do too much damage to mine. Other than her almost getting fired everything pretty much went off without a hitch. However, I think our main realization from the day was that we need to make more of an effort to reach out to friends and not focus solely on school and work.