When one
thing happens, another follows. A couple weeks ago my phone stopped working. I
had all my calls forwarded to my husband’s phone. Got by like that for a week,
but it was frustrating. I liked my phone and didn’t want to get something new
because you have to go through that learning curve all over again. Well push
came to shove and I had no choice. I had to get a new phone. I felt
uncomfortable without one. There was insurance on it so we made a call to see
what they would give us as a replacement. I had a Samsung Note 4 and they said
they would replace it with a Note 5. The only problem was they couldn’t back up
my text messages on the new phone. And my 4,000 photos were a problem too.
These two things were non-negotiable. I had messages from my dad (who died in April)
I wanted to keep. Plus I had my daughter’s and grandchildren’s messages dating
back 4 or 5 years. So I declined the replacement because they would confiscate the
old phone. I wanted to keep it. Besides the Note 5 wasn’t the newest model and that bothered my
husband. He said it was time to upgrade. So I began looking at other options.
Smart phones are not cheap. Most are in the 700 dollar range. That was a bit
costly. But, they were running a special half price event, on one or two models,
and I decided to take a look-see. Neither was a Samsung, so that made me leery
because that was the brand I always worked with. But one of them had an Android
system, which is what I’m accustomed too, so that’s the one I decided to devote
my attention too. It was a Google Pixel 3.The lady at the store gave me a quick
tutorial and that’s the phone I picked. I told her I needed the text messages
and photos from my Note 4 and she said she’d see what she could do. She backed
up my photos to the cloud as well as my phone but it took overnight to do it.
Then when we came back the next day, she did the same thing to my text messages. But again it wasn’t
straightforward. She tried all kinds of different apps until she got one that
worked. I was relieved. Finally I had a
phone. And all of my texts and photographs too. But when I got the new phone home,
away from the store, I had a terrible time figuring out how to do anything. I
couldn’t remember what the sales associate told me. It was not intuitive. And
there was no instruction book to help me. That meant going online to try to
find help. I was devastated. Here I had a new phone but I couldn’t use it. It
was worthless. I cried, ranted and felt just miserable. I hated it. I wanted my
old phone back. My husband said to give it time. I didn’t want to. I wanted it
to work now. After a day or two ignoring it, I picked it up again and started
experimenting until I got the hang of it. Eventually everything fell into
place. And now I’m a happy camper. I still have missteps where I forget how to
do something. But there are less and less of those moments as time wears
on. Have you ever been so frustrated you
thought there was no end in sight?
