In case you were curious, everyone survived Vegas, although we return a little poorer, a little sunburned, and in some cases, a little scarred from being thrown to the ground over a fight for a glow stick. Ah, humanity – how I fear for you.
Now that I’ve cleared that up, I thought I’d broach a topic of considerable personal importance to me. If you read my earlier post or are among those who’ve tried to get a hold of me during multi-week periods of disconnectedness, you may be aware that I have a complicated relationship with my iPhone…. or rather, the TEN smartphones that I’ve had since 2007. Since I’ve gotten a number of comments to the extent of “Wait you’re exaggerating right?” and “No one could be that stupid,” I thought I’d take you on a trip down iMemory lane.
Love, Hate, Lose: A Wireless Narrative
December: I get a 3GS for Christmas. At first, I’m actually really disappointed to give up my Samsung Slider. At the time, I was also JUST giving up AIM, and with it, my beloved screen name, Goddess1765. It was a period of difficult change for me – as I’m sure it was for the other 1764 Goddesses out there.
March/April: A rogue water bottle explodes in my gym bag post-Cardio Barre class in LA. Double blow to the ego, having just spent the past hour bopping around with the Real Housewives of Sherman Oaks.
Summer: Weirdest software glitch EVER where the 4,5,6 row of my keypad wouldn’t press (even though that area of the screen still worked?) Tried to ignore, but it became exceedingly difficult to live in between the 650 and 415 area codes.
Summer: Phone kept crashing and Apple replaced it with very few questions. What I learned from this is Apple stores are the best and will replace anything if you ask (or wear yoga pants? Or seem like you’ll pitch a fit? Let’s assume it’s the first…)
Winter: Phone is left *somewhere* on Stanford campus. Made the decision to tell no one and replace it via Craigslist. Drove out to some god forsaken place (in Oakland, naturally) and transacted with some guy in a wife beater, who is more than likely the Craigslist killer. Deal seemed to be too good to be true, and is – the screen cracks about three days later and I proceed to suspiciously glare at anyone at Stanford with a black iPhone. I did not make many friends that year.
July: On a family trip to visit my sister in NYC, my sister gets a new iPhone 4. Being the youngest sibling, this triggers my acute sense of parental injustice. I act exceedingly bratty until my mom says I can get an iPhone 4 if I’m nice to my sister for the remainder of the trip. Naturally, I fail this condition. And yet.
August: Get a Blackberry as my work phone because I think it will make me look professional and responsible. Ironically, I can’t lose/break this POS if I try.
Sometime: iPhone starts acting temperamental again. This time I’ve been working on a project for the Care division of a wireless provider for 6 months, so naturally I assume I know how to fix it. I try all the fancy new skillz I know (cache clear, IHLR reset, master reset, throwing it against a wall). This only seems to make the problems worse, so cue the now trademarked move: Apple store /yoga pant/complaint /new phone ™.
May (?) 2011: Eastside West. If these two words mean anything to you, then you are nodding your head in understanding right now.
November 2011: Phone left in a cab on the way to Ruby Skye after famous last words “I’ll just go out for like, 30 minutes.” I go three weeks without it, until I get hopelessly lost in Union Square (aka the tourist capital of SF) and end up walking through the Tenderloin at dusk. Proceed to pay full retail price for new iPhone and never take GPS for granted again.
…Which brings me to my current device. I treasure my iPhone the way mothers cherish their newborns. Well, the way a mother cherishes a newborn she will likely leave at the grocery checkout counter and then replace with another, potentially more advanced newborn. It’s a complicated form of love, but who’s to say it’s not real?
Smartphone #10 and I are embarking on four months together, and I predict a bright, bright future ahead.
Um. Dates are not my thing? Rough approximations now updated…though the stories remain.