iPhone Broke; World's Going to End

[Martin Hash]

There’s a feeling of panic that is unmatched in modern culture: that cold inducing dread that comes when your phone quits working. I'm hopelessly addicted, so take that feeling and turn the temperature down below Kelvin and that’s how I felt when I tried to spike a GPS at Buoy Beer in Astoria, OR and the picture froze in that peculiar way you know there’s no coming back from. For the next 6 hours, in a sweat, after restarting dozens of times, I knew the rabbit had died, the chicken had flew the coup, and revelry had sounded. I flogged that dead horse for 24 hours before giving up on vacation and heading home to Portland to make an appointment at the Apple Store in Pioneer Square. My wife, Gwynne, and I got the first appointment, and since she drives, she took me downtown. Looking at the size of that shop and the number of people scheduled for iPhone repairs was not reassuring, and even if it could be repaired, the data was worth way more than any hardware. What makes it worse is I’d made a backup before we left for the coast but the computer’s hard drive was full and I got an error at the very end of the process. We were in a hurry and I didn’t have the time to fool around, plus, it seemed like it completed before the error message so I blithely bet I wouldn’t need it anyway, never had before in 10 years.

Apple Store Portland s.jpg

I know it’s ageist, sexist & racist of me but when by chance I was assigned the young, White, autistic Apple Genius guy, a spark of hope kindled in my breast. I had to sign a waiver for them to clear the phone but I had that maybe backup at home, so I watched in horror as the phone blacked out and came up with the default screen. My trust was not misplaced; Apple Genius had the phone apart & repaired in less than an hour for less than the cost of parking downtown, and he was encouraging about the backup: “it’s probably just a version incompatibility issue,” he said reassuredly. I couldn’t wait to get home and try Restoring. I restarted my computer, made sure I had the newest version of iTunes, cleared up 16 gigs of additional disk memory just in case, and clicked the "Restore From Backup" button. A time-gauge popped up, It said, “1 min to complete, 2 min, 7 min, 30 min, about an hour, 2 hours," then when I thought I was home free: "memory read/write error." Yikes! I tried 3 more times, and 3 times it had a memory read/write error at different places, one time almost an hour in. It was past the time I was going to take my vintage Corvette to the car show. It got late. Gwynne went to bed. I was Googling, reading everything I could about memory read/write error: nothing in the Apple forums, nothing on the first page of the search, but eventually, way down on the forth page of search results, I found a post in somebody's forum entitled "memory read/write error." It said, make sure you have as much disk memory available as the size of the backup file. It took an hour to track down the backup in a hidden directory, and when I looked at the size it said, "19 gig." My drive had 19 gig available, so I cleared off 1 more gig and tried again. My fingers were crossed as the time-gauge got up to " 4 hours to complete.” I waited an hour until it said "3 hours" then waited another hour until it said, "2 hours," then finally I felt confident enough to go to bed. When I first woke up in the morning, I ran into to see if it worked? Everything was operating correctly and life was back to normal. Gwynne listened to me recount the story to everyone we met. As we were driving down the rode saying nothing to each other, she stopped the car and took a picture of me staring into my phone. "I liked you better when your phone was broke," she said flatly.

Martin's iPhone.jpg

[Montegriffo]

I don't particularly suffer from vertigo but several times last year when I was holding my phone over the parapet of a castle tower or high wall I got that knot in the stomach feeling you get from a fear of falling. Only I wasn't afraid for myself but the consequences of dropping the phone.