A friend of ours called the other day asking for advice about what to do with his cellphone.

“Chuck it into the ocean!” I yelled. But, alas, it was my husband who was on the phone call, so nobody heard me.

Anyway, you’re not allowed to pollute the ocean like that — any more — so maybe it’s just as well he couldn’t hear my sage advice.

The thing is this friend was calling from the phone store, where he’d gone with what he thought was a simple problem, a broken cellphone. But after a good 20 minutes with the salesman, he was about to spring for his own geo-stationary satellite. Or something.

“Don’t do it!” exclaimed my husband. “Whatever you’re about to do, wait for us.” And my husband and I jumped into the car and rushed to the phone store. Because under no circumstances should a friend let a friend walk into a phone store—unaccompanied.

I’ve always had my Electrical Engineer husband with me, plus sometimes the Physicist or the Economist Son. And even so, I always walk out with the dazed suspicion that I’ve been hoodwinked, but never knowing enough to know for sure.

I still remember, quite vividly, the experience of standing in that same store and thinking that I understood what the salesman was saying up to a point—and then, after that point, gibberish. I looked at my sons and they still seemed to understand the language being spoken, so maybe it was me.

All I really know is I’m still waiting for my $300 rebate.

“Oh, Judy,” says my husband, “you know that’s because of the blah blah blah that didn’t blah blah blah…” so clearly he’s part of the problem.

But honestly, it shouldn’t be so hard to buy a phone. You shouldn’t need a degree in electrical engineering to keep yourself from buying a lemon.

Now, they’re rubbing my face in it, rubbing salt in the wound, taking out the last phones I ever truly understood — the last pay phones in Manhattan. It used to be so simple. You got in the booth, put a coin in the slot, and it worked for three minutes. You wanted another three minutes, you put another coin in the slot. If you were clever, you had your next coin ready.

My favorite scene in Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film about Watergate, Katharine Graham and the Washington Post (called “The Post”) showed a reporter rushing out of the office with a bucket of coins to keep a pay phone working.

But at least when you walked out of your phone booth, your transaction was over. None of this getting a text on your phone that says, “You’re being charged for overage data. Your current overage charge is $90 for 6GB of usage, and you’ll soon be charged another $15.00. You have one day left.”

It feels like a hostage ransom note, except it doesn’t even give you any choice. And what is “overage” data, anyway? It sounds bad — although not as bad as under-age data. That would be criminal.

“Why does data have an age anyway?”

“Oh, Judy, it just means you’ve run over on a part of our family plan.”

Which means, when I finally wrap my head around it, that our children, walking around on the other side of the Earth, are costing me money…while I sleep.

“Welcome to being a parent!”

And I have no way to control it.

“Like I just said…”

To be honest, it sounds like the weirdest thing I ever heard of in physics, something even Albert Einstein thought was weird because he named it “spooky action at a distance.” As best I understand it, two particles can be created at the same time, but either near or separated in space. Either way, if one particle is in one state, the other particle will always know to be in another—simultaneously—and no matter how far apart they are.

This is just plain impossible, which is why Einstein called it spooky. It is also sometimes called “quantum entanglement.”

Entanglement is the exact right word. I am just a fly, caught up in Verizon’s web, in quantum entanglement with my family.

But it’s a strange day when I need quantum physics to help me understand my phone bill.

We performed an “exfiltration” on our friend, and got him out of that phone store and into the nearest diner with his wallet intact.

But nothing can explain to me why I’m still waiting for that $300 rebate.