My Smart Phone is smarter than I am

Here is a lesson that you can learn from my mistake.  Owning a smart phone is making me realize that I am not smart at all.  Using it to store all my contact, phone numbers, email addresses, etc, for years, it never occurred to me that it would fail me.  At my job, I had an Microsoft outlook account and someone smarter than I had trained my smart phone to sync with my work outlook account periodically so that I could see emails from work at any time.  I found this very convenient, albeit a little overwhelming, and I knew that when my access to the work email account (forgive the non-techie talk here), was turned off, that my phone might get confused.  So on Friday afternoon I visited the office of my cellular carrier and asked for assistance so that the brilliant phone would not get as confused as I had become with the syncing feature.  The technician at the store successfully removed my work outlook account from my phone and I considered the separation from my job final. 
What happened this weekend was truly alarming.  I went to find one of the hundreds of phone numbers that I thought were stored in my brilliant phone and found an EMPTY contact list.  Oh my goodness, what panic set in today, as I was trying to call a family member to tell them about my ill mother and could not call them because I did not know his cell number and my phone would not tell me either. 
Fortunately I remembered the cell phone number of my ex-CEO (sad that I knew her number, but not my father's) and called her beseeching her to help me somehow reconnect that stupid phone to the work system so that I could restore my phone numbers.  She was very understanding and said she would try to help me Monday morning, and I appreciated that a great deal, still feeling a bit panicked by losing all my contacts.  Hopefully, the really smart people in the IT department can do something to provide me all my numbers again.
If you have one of those smart phones and rely on it, make sure and have a back up plan in case you don't have access to the main database suddenly.  I will make sure and do that from now on!