jay | No cell, no deal?

I'm putting together an autonomous drilling proposal in response to an astrobiology call, due in 2 weeks. Fortuitously, my counterpart S at our robotics partner company is at the same conference this week in Washington.

After laboring overnight, I found a printer at the hotel and managed to sit down with S and go through the proposal. She seemed enthusiastic, interested, even slightly flirty. We worked out several issues. Fine. Then, as we were dispersing at the end of the day's sessions, S said that she would be out of the office until a week from tomorrow, and asked for my cellphone number so that she could contact me from various locations with her questions and suggestions.

I said that I didn't have a cellphone. After a look of bewilderment, her body language changed. S became wary, a bit distant... obviously my technical credibility had just suffered greatly due to my lack of a given communications appliance. "But, you travel so much... how can you work without one?" "I use payphones and e-mail -- NASA doesn't pay for cellphones, I'd have to get a personal phone."

At the next possible interval, S ditched me... just as she might have lost some loser in a bar. It wasn't subtle. Who knows what will happen to our drilling proposal, now? Sigh...