There is a love/hate relationship that is ever growing in my life.
Her name is technology.
I love her because she makes my life easier.
I hate her because she is a moody devil who in making my life easier has created a beast in me that demands consistency, perhaps even perfection.
Because of technology, I have a camera on hand at all times, I can Google the answer to any pondering my mind can think up, and I will never be lost.*
*All assuming I keep my battery charged and/or carry an extra battery with me at all times.
I have devices large and small, all with the same basic functions meant to assist and entertain me while at the same time lessening the amount of actual thinking I need to exert.
It is when said devices begin to run slower than the norm that I want to hurl them across the room and go back to carrier pigeons and smoke signals.
My cell phone has been particularly challenging my blood pressure lately. Every time I looked at it, I was harassed by a demand to download an update. Concurrent with this was a less than average processing speed. I would click on an app and wait two minutes for it to load.
Two minutes!
Do you know how many different commands I should be able to get through on my phone in two minutes?*
*Ironically, two minutes was a fast speed back in the day for getting a computer to start and be ready for dialing onto the internet.
The constant nagging of the update eventually wore me down and finally I allowed it. At first, everything was wonderful. My apps all had a fresh glow to them. The speed of my phone was much better than the previous weeks.
But it was too good to be true and soon my phone fell into the same slow speeds and freeze frame addiction it once had.
Hubby convinced me to restore my phone to its original factory settings. I was assured that my pictures, notes, numbers, you know, all the things I can’t live without that are stored on this tiny, metal rectangle I take everywhere with me, would be safe.
A factory reset naturally meant that the perfect organization my phone once had would now be wiped clean and set back to the ever basic standard beginnings. Regardless, everything else appeared fine. My apps began downloading again, and my faith in the ability for this little box to work properly was restored.
Until I went into ColorNote to search for the slews of notes that have been piling up since I first downloaded the app on my previous phone.
No notes.
No notes?
How could there be no notes?
I had had notes of restaurants to visit, notes of writing ideas and blog thoughts, notes of things to buy and places to go…and now? They were all gone.
This was one of those moments where you are so mad you don’t speak in order to save yourself the embarrassment of saying something you truly don’t mean. My pictures, thank goodness, were all still there. But then, I went to text someone and realized all my saved texts were gone…something that I should have known would happen. Then I realized the person’s contact information was missing from my phone. To which I was then given another lesson from Lance in saving to Google vs saving to my SIM.
So yes, it was all ultimately my fault. I had some resistance to the mighty ‘cloud’ where I should have been storing all my precious information and suffered the consequences.
And here, here is what gets my goat, boils my blood, and irks my nerves even more than all the information I lost in the reboot of my phone…
Despite updating, restoring to factory settings, deleting a lot of data that was slowing my phone down, despite all this, my phone is still choosing to move occasionally at the speed of a dinosaur. It is freezes when a call comes through. It is takes minutes to load apps. It refuses to let me swipe through my lock screen.
Part of me is convinced that this whole unfortunate series of events is a plot between my cell phone company and husband to get me to cave in and upgrade our phones.
On a side note, if you’re a regular follower of this blog, you may have noticed I have been trying out some different posting times. (For example, this post usually would have been published last night instead of this morning). I’m trying to figure yet another part of the ever-changing, expansive technological world by testing out what time of day is better for publishing my posts.
I tell myself it can only get better from here.*
*Please note: All in all, I know technology is not only a wonderful thing, but that it also involves so much more than merely electronics. This is why I have included through this post a series of pictures of pieces of technology I love.**
**Please note, my cell phone is not one of them.
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