Sigh. Ah, the travails of being a good
husband. Especially when your wife has
been using her Start Trek hand held communicator since the early days of
consumer level five iPhone computerdom (and
has been perfectly content with it.
Familiarity breeds peace, and all that). And for the last several months said
communicator has been completely on the fritz.
Switching from one program to another for no apparent reason, requiring
recharging two or three times a day and then there was the ever-present
message: “Your storage bin is completely full.
If you want to avoid imminent death, you will immediately purchase more
storage space, after which we will once again love you.” Well, maybe not in those exact words, but …
So
Christmas time came around, and guess what was on the top of my list to get for
my Sweetie? Yep, a table top
calendar. Hey, she can’t get from one
month to the next without one. And then
came the carving. I always have to do a
carving, but then third, or at the lowest fourth, was that brand new
iPhone. Oh, not the hotshot newest possible
model. Those are always too expensive and
the powers that be haven’t had time to work out all the bugs. Besides, a jump from iPhone 5 to ten might be
too much of a shock for us technologically challenged last generationers. So I got her the iPhone 7. Kept it in the box. I thought about having them go ahead and
switch over service. Then when her phone
stopped working entirely she would know for sure it was time for a new one.
And
then came that glorious Christmas morning.
Down to her very last gift, she hastily unwrapped it. A new iPhone.
What a wonderful surprise. She said
she had almost decided to wait until after the first of the year before
thinking maybe possibly about looking into getting a new one. Since it wasn’t set up or anything (it had never been released from its original
packaging), she looked at it, admired it, and put it away for the day. And the wait began …
The
day after Christmas. First things first,
right? We went to the grocery store to
stock up on food for the impending descent of ten grandchildren upon our
domestic abode. But then we went right
over to the AT&T store to have them help us get the new iPhone all set up
and ready to take its first picture (Hey,
this is Chris’ phone, OK? Her phone, her
priorities). And then ... uh oh … Seems her phone was not signed into
iCloud. And as such had never been
backed up into that miraculous nothingness capable of swallowing up and
regurgitation virtually our entire lives.
Nothing. Zero. Unbeknownst to us, then, her precious
collection of photographic memorabilia had been in mortal danger for … for …
forever. We hastily retreated from the store,
reeling from the shocking news, yet determined to rectify this unfortunate,
potentially horrifying situation.
It
took me a long time … the rest of the morning, actually, to figure out a way to
convince my laptop computer that it was, indeed, OK with me for it to back up
Chris’ phone to iTunes. After an hour or
two, it assured me that the backup was present and intact. Frightening, isn’t it, when you have to trust
the word of a 10 by 15 inch metal box? I
hesitantly began the next phase of the operation, downloaded the recent backup
onto the new iPhone.
The
first part was easy enough. Hello, back
to you in 100 different languages. What country
are you in right now? Do the stripes on
your underwear run vertically or horizontally?
But then the laptop’s careful nature began to kick in. Do you really want to trust this device? Let’s make sure. We’ll play a game. I’ll send a text to one of your other devices. You have to figure out which one it is, find
it, and enter the code I send before time runs out and you have to start all
over again with Hello and aloha and bonjour.
Oh, I played a time or two, but I could never find the right
device. Finally my impatience got the better
of me. Well, that and a phone call.
My
landline rang and the caller ID indicated that it was from none other than
Apple, Inc. Great. I had obviously done something completely
stupid and now the powers that be were calling to laugh at me and take away all
iPhone privileges, put me in iPhone time out, if you will. The voice on the other end was in an
incredibly thick foreign accent (from
where, I have no idea). I finally
pieced together that he was informing me that my iCloud account had been hacked
by somebody in Russia. He could take of
it, though. All I had to do was go
online to a website of his choosing and he would walk me through taking care of
it. Before agreeing, however, I asked
where he was. I think he said somewhere
in California, but I couldn’t hear him because of all the background noise of
others speaking with the same thick accent in the cell of an office they were
obviously working from. I told him I
would call just call Apple myself and talk to someone I could understand who
worked in a quieter office. He tried to
call back a few times but I never answered.
I did take my own advice, though.
I gave Apple a call and once I waded through the computer welcomer, ended
up talking to an actual Apple rep (a very
sweet girl who spoke with a perfectly understandable Alabama accent). Before moving on to the Chris phone issue, I asked
her about the call. Nope. Wasn’t them.
She said it was a common phishing call and to ignore it. Deal.
I
spent the next two hours on the phone with Apple. I’m not sure what the girl and her supervisor
were doing other than being very nice, but I suddenly remembered that Chris
also has an iPad mini. On a whim I checked
it out … and there was the missing text message. Where’s Waldo? Check the iPad. The code worked, and by the time the
supervisor got himself hooked into our phone so he could see it, I had the whole
thing solved and was ready to move on.
Then
we had to return to the store and politely ask them actually transfer the
service. Come to find out, I was
supposed to know a particular code to access my phone records. Didn’t know it. So after checking my drivers’ license photo and
scanning every bit of information included therein, we finally were approved to
transfer service. And Chris’ old phone
was officially history. Oh, and she also
got a new case. I think she actually has
a phone she can use now. iPhone 7. WooHoo.
Psalms
19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory
of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
Father,
thank you for sweet Alabama girls and knowledgeable supervisors and even for
phishers in California. Draw them all to
you. Amen.
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