Tuesday 14 July 2020

The Way-Back Machine - Bring Bring

Way way back in March.... which is both a hundred years ago and just the other day, I was trying to manage with the fact that a pandemic was actually going to be a world-wide thing and was starting to hit my little part of the world.  I was stressed.  Highly stressed and anxious and trying to navigate getting supplies for what?  I honestly didn't even know, but the toilet paper panic buying had happened and I was both laughing it off while emotionally rocking back and forth and trying to ignore things but also stock up?  But, on what?

But anyway, in the week or two or so before lockdown happened (or whatever the hell we call it... when our Prime Minister asked us all to stay home and things.... closed) I wasn't yet wearing a mask or gloves (although I saw it around, and thought they were being weirdly over-paranoid...sigh) but I was trying to pay attention to not touching my face and re-training myself to notice what I was touching and then not touching my face until I cleaned my hands, and trying not to touch other things too.  Like my phone.

So at some point in March I realized that my phone habits were likely meaning I was carrying around a possibly contaminated phone (I would touch things at the store and then text someone while walking home and think "damnit, I just got contamination on my phone, ugh")  I'm not super great at cleaning my phone but I have, over the years, given it a careful wipe down now and then with a paper towel and windex.  But during March, I read a thing that Apple put out saying yes, it's ok to sanitize our phones, we wiped one down a thousand times with a Lysol wipe and it's fine.  So I went ahead and gave my phone a Lysol wipe down.  And that's when the "home button" on my sweet little iPhone stopped working.

See, when I'm anxious, I'm not as careful as I might/should be.  So when I read over the article about wiping down phones, it didn't occur to me to check what phones they were talking about... especially since I had an iPhone 5.  From...whatever, a hundred years ago?  I dunno.  It worked fine.  I liked the size.  Nothing was wrong with it.  I was never able to justify the price increase to get a new one when mine was working.

And then I killed it.  Because the 5s, unlike some of the newer phones are not water....proof, or resistant or whatever and I guess enough "lysol juice" just got into the wrong part and stopped it from working.

I was sad.

But also concerned, because, well, we were now in a pandemic and locked down, and it's not like I suddenly had extra money, or the ability to go look at new phones or anything.  But I do use my phone to communicate.  And it's a de-stresser, to be honest.... to play little farm-building games or whatever other brainless games I distract my anxious self with.

I probably panicked.

But I also quickly found a workaround.  An adaptive function built into the phone that allowed me to "use" part of the screen as the home button and I told myself I could work with that workaround... for... ever?

But I also thought maybe it was time to get a new phone (And OMG I just accidentally closed this window and thankfully Blogger must have auto saved because I thought I might have lost the entire post!!!!)

So I looked into the newer phones and I'd discovered a couple of years ago that my provider no longer supports the old amount I was used to paying, so any new phone would cost me more monthly, plus the amount of "buying" the phone over whatever amount of time and there were so many phones and SUCH high prices and I debated and hemmed and hawed for a good few weeks and it felt like a poor use of money but in the end I did decide to get a new phone.

I contacted my provider (I think I did most of this by email and online, with a couple of phone calls) and chose a phone and they mailed me the phone and I figured out how to put in the SIM card (it came with instructions, it was pretty easy).  The thing I screwed up repeatedly at no small cost, however, was putting on a screen protector and that's why I always get the people in the store to do it, but I gave up after the third and so have a slightly screwed up screen protector on my new iPhone.

Ironically, I haven't been able to buy Lysol wipes online at all so there have been no more Lysol wipe-downs of any phones.... even though apparently my new phone can handle it if/when I find some.

I was, by the way, bummed at the new, large size, but suddenly apps looked better and I found myself saying "Oh, THAT'S what this app is supposed to look like... gotcha".  There are no more crashing apps (go figure, eh?!) and no more "your storage is full" notifications and, well, I didn't need the new phone, technically, but it was a large difference between the two.... so many generations apart (I chose an 11)

But, yeah.  I Lysol'd my phone to death.  I still have it, it is my new "road trip music player".  I gave my old "road trip music player" - a 4 (?) to my parents as the one they had wasn't holding battery power and I put a new battery in my 4 for my solo trip to Burning Man in 2016.

And in case you worry about me giving things to my parents, as I did, I put them in a paper bag a week before I see them, then I drop it at their front door and they come down to get it while I go to the side of the building to wave at them.  (Still made me anxious to do it in case somehow I transferred the virus to them, but that's a whole other story I suppose.)

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