Call your mom for everything

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In my family, this is called “pulling a Jessica,” since it’s my standby to get through almost any situation.

My mom is the original Siri. Chances are, your mom would similarly get a kick out of you calling her to ask for such things as:

1. Where your next class is. Instead of being all organized and printing out a map of your new university campus, or embarrassing yourself by asking an upper-classman for help locating Biology 101, just have your mom logon to the university website and look at the map to guide you.

2. How to get to the Boston airport from an unknown location somewhere on Cape Cod where you’ve found yourself in the dark and rain with no street signs. Your mom can try to locate you on Google maps by your explanations of what you see. It’s cheating to use GPS, after all.

3. What you should do when you’ve gone through customs in Heathrow airport and forgot to pick up your baggage first.

4. Why you are currently driving over a bridge when you thought you were just going home from your mom’s office the way you came, and there was no water crossing on that trip.

Help! How do I get my truck out of the mud? I forgot that it doesn't have 4-wheel-drive!

5. Why there is suddenly snow on your drive from San Diego to Santa Barbara. (Hint: you forgot to turn in Los Angeles and are going over the mountains into the central Valley. You are semi-screwed.).

6. The phone number of your friend who you are supposed to be meeting but whom you cannot find.

7. What to do about the fact that you appear to have dengue fever and there is no qualified non-drunk doctor on the island to assess your % likelihood of dying without intervention.

8. Whether it’s normal that your hand/eye/head/etc. is swollen/blue/red-speckled/etc. or if you need to go to the hospital. (It helps that my mom works with a few MDs, who now know my entire medical history based on these phone calls).

Some of these things could be solved independently by nifty things like GPS or googling the answers yourself, but that’s not nearly as fun.

My mom, reading up on answers to questions I might call and ask her at any moment.