Yesterday afternoon I was talking on the phone to Gulley. We were just about to hang up when my phone cut me off and that’s when I noticed it had the spinning circle of death on the screen. Which really came as no surprise considering that my two-year-old iPhone has gotten to the point where it holds a charge for all of thirty minutes.
So I plugged it into the wall to charge, but when I came back thirty minutes later it still had the spinning circle thing. I tried to turn it off and it didn’t work. I hooked it up to my computer. Nothing.
This is a little embarrassing to admit but I began to wonder how long I was going to be without my phone. I felt like I’d just lost something very important like my favorite pair of jeans or one of my arms. And I thought about how these things never happened back in the day when phones were attached to a wall and had that twisty cord that you could twirl around and around and around your finger while you talked to that cute boy from Pre-Algebra who finally called you.
I had no idea what to do now that all my communication with the outside world had been cut off and so I figured I’d call Gulley to ask her how to fix my phone. But first I had to plug in our home phone. We unplugged it about a month ago because no one ever calls us on our home phone except solicitors or “sailors” as Caroline calls them since they are just trying to “sail” you something. (No, I don’t have a strong accent. Why do you ask?)
Anyway, I wasn’t going to call Gulley because she has some sort of expertise in the field of iPhones. In fact, she carried a plain old flip phone until some time last year when it finally just broke in two pieces. It’s just my natural response to call Gulley anytime any sort of crisis arises. And while she is wonderful at giving all sorts of life advice on many subjects, she was no help at all in this situation. Although she did ask her husband and he suggested I take out my SIM card and put it back in.
The only problem is that solution made the assumption I know how to take out the SIM card in the first place.
I looked for some place to take out a battery or something and was about to resort to my standard, highly technical method of fixing things and just bang it really hard on the countertop. And, if that didn’t work, maybe throw it through the window.
Because all I knew is that there was no way I was going to walk into the Apple store and go up to the Genius Bar with my sad little generation ANCIENT iPhone 3. Oh the mockery and sneering that would ensue. And that would just be from my fellow customers.
I’m still not over the humiliation of going into the AT&T store last spring to buy a new case for my phone and being told in a stage whisper, “We keep the cases for the iPhone 3s in the back.” They obviously did not want to taint their showroom with any type of antiquated cases from 2010.
Ultimately, I recalled that Gulley suggested I might want to check the Google and see if I could find a help site. So I googled “Walking in shame that I still have an iPhone 3 and now it won’t turn off or die. Help me.”
And this is why the internet is such a handy, modern device. I immediately found a message board where various folks were mocking some poor soul who stored a lot of photos on his iPhone only to have it die and lose all his pictures, but in the midst of all that mockery I saw that someone suggested he put his phone in recovery mode by pressing the HOME button and POWER button simultaneously and holding them for fifteen seconds.
I tried it. And TA-DA it worked.
I realize this is probably the most uninteresting thing you’ve read in a long time, but it’s the most interesting thing that happened to me yesterday so imagine how I feel.
And now I’m off to play Words with Friends because you don’t know what you’ve got until you think it might be gone.
Goodbye.