That’s what I get for talking smack about my phone*

I love my iPhone. Seriously, love it. I have all my contacts in the palm of my hand. I can check my email. I can look stuff up. I can take pictures. I just love having all of that convenience right in my left front pocket. Linus has his security blanket; I have my iPhone.

But last week, Traci mentioned she wasn’t wild about her iPhone and was hoping to get a replacement phone for her birthday. She said she had problems with the phone feature, that it occasionally called people she didn’t intend to call. I, a diehard iPhone enthusiast, was dismayed by her report. But I had to be honest and admit that I, too, was not a fan of it as an actual phone. Which, I suppose, is kind of a big deal. It is my only phone – I justified the cost of the data plan by canceling our home phone service. It’s not that I have a bunch of dropped calls; it’s that the calls don’t come through. I’ll have several messages without ever hearing the phone ring or feeling it vibrate. Okay, sometimes I do forget to turn the ringer back on after church, but even accounting for that I miss a lot of calls.

Apparently my little gadget took my comments personally and decided to get even. It froze yesterday. Froze completely. All I got was an apple on my screen with a status bar that moved about an 1/8th of the way across the screen, then rebooted and did the whole thing over again.

But Apple was great. I spoke with someone three different times and each time the Apple Advisor appeared to be a native English speaker (shocker right there) who actually seemed interested in my problem. The last call, to Vonda, was thirty minutes long and she interspersed the tech talk with jokes that set my mind at ease.

In the end I had to go to the Apple store in Grand Rapids to get the thing reset. And even that experience was painless – thankfully Vonda set up an appointment for me. Last time I just stopped in the store thinking one of the nice blue shirt employees could talk to me. I had no idea they were booked from open to close and appointments were the only way to access an Advisor. My Advisor yesterday was jovial, upbeat and sang the praises of the new iPhone 4; I finally had to ask him to stop because there is no way I’m getting one and I needed to stop hearing about the amazing HD video capabilities of the new phone.

Thankfully I’d backed up my data on Saturday so I was able to come home, plug the phone in and everything went back to the way it was (except my Google calendar which I still can’t figure out – anyone have any tips?). And the best news is for the 20 hours I didn’t have access to my phone’s information I was actually okay. Now, I was asleep for six of those hours and another six I was home so I could check my email on my laptop, but for the other eight hours I was okay. I had no idea what time it was, but I got along just fine.  Which is good news considering I'll be without it for two weeks when we go out of the country the end of this month.

But oh, boy, am I glad to have my little iPhone back in working order. And Michael is glad he won’t have to answer my, “How do I …?” questions about his phone any more.


*I try to use slang but I just don’t think I can pull it off. I’m leaving it but I’m feeling like a poser. And there I go again…


________________________