Peace of Mind Organizing

The dark side of my iPhone love

4 August 2014

I truly love my iPhone 5S, as I’ve mentioned here repeatedly. (And before the 5S, I loved my 4S with equal fervor.) But on Friday, I came to know the flip side of that love: Dependence and betrayal.

I was leading a team at a client’s house, trying to keep my eye on the clock. Since I got my Fitbit Flex I depend on my trusty phone to tell me the time. I consulted it at 3:42. Then, at about 4, I pulled it out of my pocket to check the time and the phone didn’t turn on. I was puzzled as to why the it would have run out of battery power since I’d barely used it all day. I borrowed a charging cable from my client and plugged it in. No response from my phone. I left it plugged in for a couple of hours (it was a long day) and it remained dead.

The moment I realized I did not have use of my phone until I could take it to the Apple Store (the first available appointment was in 24 hours), I felt a little sick. And a little panicky. And sort of betrayed. It made me realize how much I’ve come to depend on this little device.

As I’ve gleefully mentioned before, I depend upon my phone for the following:

• Phone calls (I have no landline)
• Texting
• Access to email when I’m out and about
• Access to my calendar
• Access to Evernote for my various notes about life
• Access to the web to look stuff up
• Camera
• Reminders
• Mileage tracker
• Calculator (I needed to calculate what I owed my team members and how much my client owed me)
• Staying in touch with my husband (I phoned my husband from my client’s phone so that he wouldn’t worry when he couldn’t reach me)

That’s a whole lot of stuff to suddenly lose access to.

I did feel good that even if I my phone was permanently dead, at least most of my phone’s contents were automatically backed up to iCloud. And I kicked myself for not having sent a Milebug report to myself very recently.

There’s a happy ending here. On Saturday morning, I decided to try my phone again and it came on. Everything seems to be working fine. I rescheduled my Genius Bar appointment to Tuesday, to avoid the weekend crowds. I’m going to have them run diagnostics to make sure the phone is okay. (And I sent myself a Milebug report.)

The whole episode got me thinking: Should I try to reduce my dependency on my phone? Should I have a backup plan in place in the event it dies again? I haven’t come to any conclusions. (I’m just so happy that it’s back.)

Do you depend on your phone as much as I do? Do you have a plan in place in the event you were to lose your phone or it were to die suddenly?

Photo by Nathan Borror via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License

Tagged with: iphone, technology

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