While waiting for the water to boil for coffee this morning, I flipped open my tablet to see what was going on in the world of Twitter. And nothing. Nothing was going on. Twitter was down for maintenance. Never saw that before. But no worries. I went back to brewing the morning joe and didn’t give it another thought until I was headed downstairs with a hot cuppa in one hand and my tablet in the other.

After I checked out the morning comics, I flipped open the tablet to see if Twitter was back up. Couldn’t tell. Had to sign in. Trouble with that was, I created my Twitter account so long ago that I couldn’t remember my password. I knew this would be a problem sooner or later, but I’d put off changing it until now because changing it would mean updating my account on my tablet, my phone AND my desktop. I mean, just changing one thing would be okay, but THREE?

I didn’t have a choice now, though, so I clicked on the “forgot my password” link and tapped in my e-mail address. When it asked for my phone number, I keyed it in as a ten-digit string of numbers all run together, which it rejected, so I tried again with parentheses around the area code and a dash between the exchange and my number. Still no joy. What, my landline? I didn’t think so, but I tried it anyway. Nope, that wasn’t it, either. I couldn’t remember any other phone numbers off the top of my head, so I tried transposing the numbers I most likely would’ve mixed up.

That went on way longer than it should have, and stopped only when I remembered that I used to have a pay-as-you-go flip phone many moons ago. Had no idea what the phone number was, but I remembered that I’d written it on the case. Not that it did me any good to remember that; it wasn’t in my sock drawer, or in any of the desk drawers, or in any of the other junk drawers in the house, because they’re all junk drawers, aren’t they? I looked through notebooks and address books, even though I was pretty sure I’d never written my own phone number down in any of them. I was screwed. This was looking pretty bad.

And then I remembered that I saw my Blackberry in a dresser drawer, and that my Blackberry had the same phone number as the flip phone. I even managed to find a cord to charge the Blackberry, no small feat when just last weekend I’d spent hours untangling the one or two chords I thought were useful from the knot of wires balled up in a plastic bin in the basement. The charging cord wasn’t one of them, thank dog. It took only five minutes or so to charge up the Blackberry battery enough so I could navigate to the screen that would show me the phone number, which I wrote on the first flat surface that my pen could find.

Miracle of miracles, that was the number that unlocked my Twitter account! And that was the number I immediately deleted so I wouldn’t get locked out again. Crisis averted. I can tweet again. Were you holding your breath? I knew you were.