Yesterday was a disaster waiting to happen and it didn’t disappoint!
After a killer workout at Planet Fitness, I was all set to come home and start plotting out the next three books in my Will Cook For Love Series – even though book #1 ( Cooking With Kandy) won’t be released until April 4.
But I digress….
I left the gym, sipping water from a Poland Springs bottle and checking my phone for email messages when I slipped on a patch of black ice and…wait for it….dropped my phone. You thought I was gonna say something like I broke a leg or an arm, weren’t’cha??!! hee hee. Anyway. I retrieved the phone from under my car – yes, it bounced all the friggin’ way under – and pressed the screen button so I could check and make sure it was okay.
It wasn’t.
The screen lit up and then started flickering like a light bulb does when it’s starting to blow. I watched as it had a full-fledged Samsung seizure and then just… winked out.
So. Okay. I figured the lightbulb inside it had blown. No worries. I hightailed it over to USCellular,
a mere three minutes’ drive and told the lovely tech lady there what happened, describing the light blowing.
“Um, No,” she said. She took the phone from my hand and ran her finger along the screen. “There’s no light bulb inside this, so what I think is that you have a broken connection underneath the LED.” I have no idea what that means – didn’t then and still don’t.
Okay, so go ahead and fix it, I said, expansively.
“Do you have insurance?” she asked.
“What, like life? Car?”
She shook her head. “Phone.”
And there, my friends, is where the second part of this disaster occurred. The answer to the question was a resounding no, I did not.
After a few moments of typing on her USCellular computer, she said, “Well. The phone is for all intents and purposes, broken and non functional, so it will cost about **** ( insert astronomical figure of your choice here) to try and fix the problem, but I don’t see that happening, so you might as well just get a new phone.”
“Okay.” I figured, why not? Even though the phone was only a year and month old, I could always stand a new one.
Here’s the corker…are you ready for it?
“You owe **** ( a little less than astronomical amount -but not much!) on the old phone, so you need to pay that off in full first before I can give you a new one.”
Truly? Could this day get any worse?
Well, yes. It could.
I need my phone. I do. I always say I don’t know how we survived before cell phones ( I know we did!) but I am just so dependent on that damn thing, that I have to have one. So…. I paid the balance on the old (13 months!) broken one and then was lucky enough to get the same model back as a new one.
But….
The lovely tech lady suggested I now get insurance on the phone AND get a case whereby if I dropped it again, I wouldn’t break it. Okay, that didn’t sound too bad. The insurance is only 8 bucks a month – I can live with that. They case? Yeah, not so lucky with the price there. Another large chunk of change passed hands and I now had a case, insurance, and new phone.
You might think this is the end of the story, but it’s not.
Because I’m so tech illiterate – and there really should be an actual word for that – I said, “so can you transfer the stuff from my old phone to the new one?”
The Lovely Tech lady stared at me, speechless, but I just know she was thinking, “What part of the phone is for all intents and purposes broken and nonfunctional did you not understand?”
She blinked and said, “Well, we can tryyyyyyyyyyy ( yes she did elongate the word), but..” She shrugged and that told me everything I needed to know. “Do you back your data up? ”
Um, no because I didn’t even know you could!!
All my photos, all my text messages, my settings, my apps, my entire workoad, was on the old, now broken and non-functional phone.
“So,” I said, fighting the tears I felt stinging my eyes, “can you try? Please?”
She nodded, but I knew, deep down, she thought it was a waste of time.
She got some weird looking connector and attached the new phone to the old one and then pressed a few buttons.
And….nothing happened.
The threatening tears swelled a little bigger and I said a quick, silent Novena.
Then, the old phone, well chugged, is the best word, beeped once, and then the new phone lit up. “I think I can get something,” the Lovely Tech Lady said. “What can you absolutely not live without that’s on this old phone?”
I didn’t even think. “My photo gallery. If you can get that back, I’ll march right over to Church and give thanks! Everything else, the apps, and the programs, I can try and re-do when I have time, but the pictures are important. I don’t have copies of them anywhere – hard or digital.”
She nodded and pressed a bunch of buttons. Just when it looked like the connection would hold, it broke. Not once, but twice.
Her sigh was heavy and long. “Just try one more time, please,” I begged. Hey, I’m not proud. I wanted those pictures.
She did, and after about 15 minutes, my photos uploaded just in time for the old phone to chug and fritz out again.
But I had my precious photos, so I was happy. Well, happy may not be the right word for all this aggravation, but hey, I had my pictures.
Several hundred dollars and almost an hour and a half later, I left USCellular and went directly to church where I said a quick prayer of thanks, and a long one that my new phone stay in working and functional order for another 24 months – the time it would take to pay it off!
Byt the time I got home I was hungry, tired, pissed off, and behind on my writing schedule.
Yeah, A disaster is exactly what the damn day was!
Peggy Jaeger, Author 