My phone has been messing with me lately. In fact, I would say this phone is up to shenanigans, a word I use as homage to my dear friend, Kari, who loves shenanigans both as a fun word and amusing activity.

Anyway, the shenanigans began last week when my new Bluetooth started speaking to me in Spanish. Now, I’m pretty sure that the last Bluetooth I owned several years ago didn’t speak at all, but this one wants to chat with me every time the phone rings. Since I took French in school and don’t live in a part of the country where Spanish is used a lot, I have to guess at what she is trying to tell me. Sometimes it sounds like she’s repeating numbers. When I turn it on in the morning, I think she might be reporting on the battery charge level. I’m not sure and don’t much care. Since the old Bluetooth didn’t feel obligated to communicate with me at all, I think I can probably safely ignore the senorita’s chit chat. Oh, and Motorola doesn’t say how to change the language, by the way.

Then this morning, while el Bluetooth was still snoozing at my desk, I was checking emails and Facebook on my phone while having a cup of coffee. I do this every day. I kick back in the recliner with the dogs on my lap and slowly think about becoming productive. I’m not one to hop out of bed and into the shower. I think this more gradual awakening is a trait I inherited from my beloved dad. After he’d been retired for a few years, Dad spent most of the morning in his bathrobe, reading the paper and working on crossword puzzles. Sometimes I’d drop by at noon and my mother would be cleaning or ironing or cooking or even just returning from morning golf, and there Dad would be, still in his robe, solving puzzles at the kitchen table. This is what I aspire to in retirement, myself.

So, back to the recliner in my own bathrobe, snuggling with the dogs. At some point when I probably meant to tap on a video, or increase the volume, or maybe swipe to another screen, I unwittingly managed to change the time zone on the phone’s clock.

I’m savoring my coffee and petting the pups when I glance down at the phone a while later and the display says it’s a few minutes before 8:00. What?! The clock in the living room said it wasn’t quite 7:00, but phones are reliable, right? You can count on them for the correct time, right? Right. So I dumped the dogs off my lap and jumped in the shower, tossed on some clothes, and was at my desk less than 15 minutes later. Oh – and in the meantime, I changed every clock in the house to match my phone. Because – say it with me – PHONES ARE ALWAYS RIGHT.

Well, computers are always right, too. And guess what? As I threw myself into the desk chair in front of my laptop, I saw that the time in the corner of the screen said 7:12. Who do I believe now? Phone? Computer? My U-Verse cable box doesn’t have a display, so there wasn’t a third source to check.

So, I went to Settings on my phone and was astonished to learn that the phone thought we were living in Newfoundland, or perhaps were adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, because we’d zipped right past Eastern Standard Time into an Atlantic time zone an hour ahead of us. Did my phone think we were out whaling? Did it hope we were cruising on the Queen Mary, heading for a fabulous vacation in England? Really, phone? Really?

At least I got an early start to the day. But any more shenanigans, and this guy is going back to the AT&T store for an attitude adjustment.

Phone says, “Buenos nochas.”