Shakespeare laid out how a small error could produce a cascade of consequences that would lead, in the case of Richard III, to catastrophe. The king’s farrier had used one nail too few on the king’s horse’s hooves, and, as the bard tells us: “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; For want of the shoe, the horse was lost; For want of the horse, the rider was lost; For want of the rider, the battle was lost; for want of the battle, the kingdom was lost.” That, I have to say, is a pretty neat summation of what happens when a car-pooling mother gets into rush-hour traffic 10 minutes late, with only one of the many children she will need to transport over the course of the afternoon, and discovers that she can’t find her cell phone.
Like King Richard, thrown from his ill-shod mount, too late does she realize her fatal deficiency. Alas, by that time, she has already merged onto the Beltway and is lashed to destiny.
“Argh! Where is my phone?” the mother yelps, rummaging through her handbag as the vehicle hurtles along 495.
For want of the cell, she can’t call a distant school to tell a girl to wait with her sister to be picked up, rather than to catch a ride erroneously arranged with another mother. For want of reaching that girl, she can’t prevent the child from being carried many miles in the wrong direction. For want of being unable to stop that transportation, she now must fetch the young person, adding another 50 minutes of driving to what was already shaping up to be a gruesome multihour, multidestination ordeal.
“It’s on the dining room table,” replies a 4-year-old voice from the back seat. “I played with it.”
Light floods onto the situation, revealing its terrible contours.
The phone is in Bethesda. The car is headed toward Kensington, already late for a three-girl pickup, followed by a two-girl ballet drop-off in Northwest, succeeded by a one-teenager retrieval in Georgetown, ending in Bethesda long enough to disgorge most of the vehicle’s occupants before a dash back to D.C. to fetch one ballet girl and bring her back to the suburbs. A child is now mistakenly en route to Potomac, where she will be dropped off at her brother’s school just as he has left to catch a bus that will likely pass his mother’s car at least once in her ludicrous late-afternoon spanning of the topography.
Many solutions present themselves: The driver could bail on ballet, take the short route to Potomac to fetch the errant girl, and drop the unrelated ballet girl at her house. She could tell the Georgetown teenager to take a city bus home. She could tell the boy to wait for his little sister, and bring her with him on the Maryland bus.
But she can’t do any of these things. Why? For lack of a cell phone.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday.
She can be contacted at
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