I got my first cell phone for my birthday at the end of eighth grade, and I distinctly remember that I was the last of my friends to get on the bandwagon. By the time I finally got my hands on that brand new Samsung Chocolate flip phone, my classmates had already moved on to the latest and greatest. While they were all rejoicing over the multitude of different apps, games and messaging features, I was just happy that I didn’t have to call my friends from my family’s landline anymore. I never felt left out. The wait for a cell phone had been a long one for me, but finally getting one felt like a sweet victory, and I wasn’t going to let my friends’ high scores in doodle jump squander that. I now have an iPhone SE, which for the past year has felt brand new to me. However, now that Apple quietly discontinued the SE after launching their brand new line of phones, I’ve realized that I’ll never be up to date with cellular technology, because sometimes it just isn’t feasible to always have the latest and greatest. Today, I view my cell phone as a distraction. While I can acknowledge its many useful aspects, such as iMessage, Facetime, Apple Wallet, etc., I struggle to maintain a proper balance of utilizing these features while also keeping the device from stalling my overall productivity, or distracting me in social settings. For me, having a cell phone now feels a lot less like the victory I thought it to be in middle school, but rather a constant tug-of-war for my attention.
Everyday there are new leaps in cellular communication, and it is fascinating to see how we adapt, or how we stay the same in the face of groundbreaking innovation. This is what drew me to the Cellular Connections project, and I look forward to acquiring a greater depth of understanding into the relationship between cell phones and people.
Update:
A few weeks ago, calamity struck. Late for class, I was leaving my dorm and pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the time. With my gloves on, I lost grip of the phone and watched as my caseless iPhone SE spiraled towards the concrete. When it hit the ground, I noticed the fragments of my screen splintering off of the device in slow motion, and stood there helplessly as my phone skittered into a nearby puddle of rainwater. ¨Awesome¨, I said facetiously, receiving some disapproving glances from strangers passing by. I picked up my phone and decided that class was no longer important. I then found myself in line at the grocery store buying rice that would somehow magically revive my phone.
The rice failed me, and I buried my trusty SE. Initially, I thought this wouldn’t be an issue, and that I could easily secure another one from T-Mobile. However, after some light googling I realized that Apple, in their infinite genius, decided to discontinue every model of the iPhone that had a headphone jack and wouldn’t pressure me to scan my fingerprints into iOS everyday. I perused Amazon, and realized that Bezos would have me paying about five times the price for an SE that I would otherwise be able to purchase through my phone provider for around $40. Against my own personal morals and what was (at the time) a genuine testimony in my cell phone biography, I shamefully sprung for the upgrade.
The day after the calamity, my thumbprinting, headphone-jackless, dongle-dependent iPhone 8 was handed to me at 9:15 AM by a surprisingly friendly T-Mobile employee. He said ¨have a good day¨, and I did not. When I got back to my dorm, I spitefully took this inferior device out of its packaging. I turned on the phone and realized there was a passcode. This was concerning because I hadn’t set a passcode yet. I then realized that my new phone was restored from a year and a half old backup of my iPhone from September of 2017, which was around the time that I declared that ¨I will never pay 99 cents a month for extra iCloud storage!¨
Excellent thinking. Now that my SE was no longer turning on (thanks for nothing, rice) I couldn’t do a physical iTunes backup and store the data to be transferred from there. I quickly went to my computer to restore the new phone so at the very least it wouldn’t be stuck in the past, but all of a sudden, I realized I didn’t know my Apple ID or password. So at this point, not only was I locked out of my phone entirely, I was locked out of iTunes, and wouldn’t be able to reset my phone.
I eventually borrowed a friend’s phone so I could plea with Apple customer support to reset my Apple ID, but ¨Crystal¨ kept telling me that I would have to wait 24 hours for the ID and password to reset. When I was a kid, I never understood why my Dad would be so short tempered with customer support, but in this moment it all made sense. I asked Crystal if there was anything I could do, and she walked me through the process of restoring the phone to factory settings so at the very least I could text and call, but at some point, our call dropped. I went to call Crystal back and was reconnected with a different customer support employee, who had no idea of my situation, and had no idea who Crystal was when I asked to be transferred back to her line. Thus I had to explain my convoluted predicament again, resulting in an unfortunate headache and a sickening feeling of deja vu.
After Crystal's replacement, I ended up with ¨Darlene¨, who quickly and efficiently helped me solve my problems. And through divine intervention, I also remembered my Apple ID and password which expedited the recovery process. A lot of the breakdown in this case was the result of my own stubbornness, for example, not putting a case on my phone and refusing to upgrade my iCloud storage. However, the one thing that I found fascinating about this whole episode was how it completely derailed my entire day. Being phoneless made me realize not only how dependent we are on the device, but also how frantic we can become when we lose that which we are dependent on. I pride myself in being a fairly calm and level-headed person, but going through the hellish gauntlet of Apple Care, Crystal and her many cronies was the ultimate test of my patience, and shook me to my core.
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