I Miss My PalmPilot

Once upon a time I lived on the cutting edge of technology. I stayed there for several years, owning a series of PalmPilots early in the PDA revolution. Then QWERTY keyboards on phones came out and being both a power user and slight gear whore, I abandoned PalmPilot and had an LG phone with QWERTY keyboard and flip up lid, initiating Me into the age of texting at the expense of all other data functionalities.  Blackberry just never seemed worth it to Me, tiny buttons and that pesky lawsuit.

In time, three things I love (PDA, querty, apple) combined and I got an iPhone. And I have had a series of misadventures with iPhone backup.

Once a well-meaning subby who works in IT decided to help me by upgrading My iOS to the new version. Despite being told I was terrified of losing all My data and he must not lose all My data, he lost all My data, including several years of photos and 20 very expensive opera lessons in another country. Thereafter I resolved to never trust anyone else again with My iphone, and to get better at this, so I have been very careful with the current iPhone. I bought it before leaving the country and chose it to have the max 128 MB of memory so that I could take unlimited photos and videos while I was traveling abroad. It was SPECIFICALLY the need for more photos and videos and storage that caused me to buy the new iPhone 27 months ago. Perhaps, gentle reader, you begin to see where this road may lead. Since then I have amassed a mountain of photos and wonderful videos. This week the phone began acting strangely after I installed iOS 11.0.1.   I called Verizon to complain that I couldn’t text anything over the LTE connection, they ran a diagnostic which took almost an hour to install due to the poor connections on both 4G and Wi-Fi. And about the time the nice rep was telling Me that My sim card might be going bad, he interrupted himself to announce I would be receiving a refurbished phone because My battery had a flunked

the diagnostic in spectacular fashion. A replacement phone arrived in less than 24 hours and I carried it around for a few days until I had the mental energy to focus on the upgrade. Last night I did that. 

I very, very carefully followed ALL the instructions. They were a little annoying because they consisted of six steps, and each step told Me to go read online for the details. I of course can’t do that when I’m screwing with the phone. So first I read all the websites to make sure I was clear, and it was at this point that the Verizon website decided that it needed a nap. So I ended up on tech-support and eventually was able to proceed.  One of the super duper important steps is to back up, so I backed everything up to the iCloud, and was proud to confirm that indeed a back up had been done 36 hours previously, so I was almost feeling good about myself and my tech skills with the iPhone again. I successfully erased my iPhone, damaged an earring trying to remove the sim card, fixed the earring post that was bent by the sticky sim card tray, moved everything over to the new phone, got it to work and was generally feeling almost proud of Myself, like I had recovered from the previous trauma of losing everything. 

That lasted about 30 minutes until I went to pull up a photo. It was at this point I realized I had no photos. There then ensued several hours of swearing; head scratching; deep depression; complaining; wringing of hands; raging against machines; imposition of ashes; and the search for overnightable sack cloth on Amazon. 

Having already erased the previous phone it was impossible to look at My Settings and see what might have been fucked up. I considered calling My previous slave who might have some answers and decided that that was no longer a choice. I was dutifully advised by boy d to look in the iCloud and see if I could find them anywhere, but since the new phone was telling me that iCloud had not been set up yet I became fearful that I would accidentally over-write what photos might be in the iCloud with the nothingness currently on the new handset. 

I went to bed convinced that I was deeply screwed, resolved to throw Myself on the mercy of the Genius Bar on Saturday at whatever point I could generate enough hope to get out of bed. I woke to a beautiful morning not immediately remembering how screwed I am. Then I did, and opened Notes to draft a blog. Then My head exploded as I realized I have lost all My Notes TOO.   As I laid there (in bed, naked in the golden, liquid life-is-good sunshine) blankly looking at the screen, I was confused. A moment ago there were zero notes. Now there are more. I look and I’ve only lost a year, ok, whew, that beats the alternative. Then I actually saw a progress wheel come up and spin. And ah-HA! Suddenly there it all was. 

Well, at least I didn’t lose ALL My data.

I took a photo. Last night in all the drama I had taken a new photo and it showed up in the memory as being “1 of 1”. That’s how I knew Houston had a problem. This morning when I took a different photo and went to text it, it was not 2 of 2. Instead all of My photos were present - all 27 glorious months of photos are on My iPhone replacement. I guess that’s not considered an essential function and so it happens later in the reinstall process. I had noticed third-party apps were still downloading in the background at one point last night but I didn’t care about them very much so I figured they would arrive eventually. I didn’t realize that was the case with the photos. It apparently it took all night for them to come. 

So as much as I love Steve Jobs and as much as I love Apple, I want to say that I miss My PalmPilot. My PalmPilot had a physical cradle with a physical button and a physical cable and all I had to do was set My PalmPilot in the cradle and push a button and everything in the palm pilot auto magically would go into the laptop. And I could see it RIGHT THERE.  There was an extremely simple interface that allowed Me to choose whether I wanted to synchronize them both or have one overwrite the other. I never screwed that up.  True, if the laptop crapped out at the same time as the phone, in an iCloudless world, one was still screwed.

In point of fact, I did not screw this one up this time. I just didn’t understand the reinstall process and suffered flashbacks as a result.  So I did not screw up but it was so upsetting for a while, it *feels* like I did. So I did good but it strangely does not feel like a success. 

Now I shall get out of bed and finish My taxes.