Would you risk your life for your cell phone?

Sounds like a ridiculous question, right? Risking your life for your cell phone isn’t something any rational person would do.

But someone did and paid dearly.

In the split second you drop a cell phone, you might not be at your most rational. You may have a hundred phone numbers in your contacts that are not memorized and may be forever lost if you don’t get that phone back. Not to mention all your personal and financial information that may be stored in it. Various passwords, too. Your whole life is now tied up in that smart device.

When you think of it that way, it’s easier to see how a 25-year-old man ended up in serious condition in the hospital. He dropped his cell phone onto the tracks at the PATH in Hoboken. He tried to get to it.

The problem was the high-voltage third rail that powers these trains.

In reaching for the phone, he touched that rail. Done. Lights out. He was electrocuted and unconscious when Port Authority police arrived about 2 a.m. Sunday to rescue him. Power was turned off, and the man was carried from the tracks.

Miraculously, he was stabilized and then taken to a hospital where he was reported in serious but stable condition. I hope he continues on to a full recovery.

It really makes you think about how important these phones have become in every aspect of our lives.

People who can barely swim will dive right out of a boat if they drop their phone into a lake. We’ve all heard the horror stories about someone dropping a cell phone into a porta john and immediately, without thought of the microbial consequences, diving their arms right in to grab it.

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What happened in Hoboken is extreme, though. If there’s a lesson here, it’s not that we’re too wrapped up in our cell phones. That is just now a fact of life moving forward. It’s to back up those contacts and passwords. Back up those photographs. Backup everything. Sure, our lives are in our cell phones, but let’s not make it literally.

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