I didn’t realize–I mean, really realized–how much of my life is attached to my cellphone until tonight when it locked up.
Friday, January 28, 2022:
I don’t know about you, but my phone is attached to my hip almost surgically. Texting is in my blood. Phone contacts are my life preserver. My calendar is my life reminder. Thank goodness I use a paper planner for some appointments, decorated with stickers. I use the clock as an alarm and a timer. Just now, my phone froze and wouldn’t open or shut down.
To pass the frustrating time, I just put a load of laundry in the washer and thought, Let me set a timer for me to…oh, right, my phone isn’t working.
Of course, the fix couldn’t be easy. YouTube instructions went just so far. Online Apple support went just so far as well. “We need to send you a verification code. How do you want to receive: text or phone call?”
Neither, Apple, my phone is stuck!
Amen to us paying an obscene monthly amount for a landline. Lifeline.
Calling Apple Support got me to a human being in a brief moment of time, surprising and satisfying. John walked me though the steps, taking me beyond online support to phone backup. My life could not be that easy. After all the usual techniques, my only option: restore to factory settings.
Let that sink in for a moment. Factory Settings.
Thank goodness we own a family desktop computer–remember those?–in addition to our individual laptops. On a wing and a prayer, I mouse-clicked Restore.
I don’t even have my Spotify to listen to as my phone displays “Restore in Progress” as I flip out to iTunes on my desktop current displaying “Restoring iPhone from backup…Time remaining: About 7 hours”. Like I’ll be able to sleep night until this completes.
Unfortunately, I do not (yet!) have an iCloud account with enough memory to backup, but I do backup to my desktop. Amen to physical hardware.
I backup my phone every 2-3 weeks, and always before updating the iOS software. My last backup was 1/4/2022 at 2:34am. Today is 1/28/2022 at 11:22pm.
I presume a month of my life will be lost when this is complete, still in “About 7 hours.” Reminds me of my awesome high school 11th grade English teacher. I adored him, partially because he constantly supported my writing. On this particular day, my class was working on our individual essays in a shared computer room.
“Save after ever sentence. You don’t want to lose your work,” he said as a mantra. “Save after every sentence.”
Yeah, right, I thought, mentally rolling my eyes, as I expect most of my classmates did. That was excess and extreme. I saved after every paragraph. If I saved every sentence, I’d lose my flow of writing.
Suddenly, the room got dark. The computers hummed low. The lights snapped on and the computers hummed alive.
My teacher had turned the room’s power switch off.
“I hope you saved your document,” he said in a satisfying tone.
The room gasped and groaned as my classmates grumbled and growled. I lost a paragraph; some lost their entire document. Lesson learned.
Are you prepared if this disaster struck you?
Time remaining: About 6 hours.
