A few days after stepping off the plane in Newark, my blog post covering Texas and New Mexico half-drafted, I was out on a bike ride, having fun, training for Kentucky, when my phone piped up from inside my jersey, yelling “Emergency call!” Emergency call!”
Well, that was alarming. I thought it was some kind of intervention by my cell phone carrier to get me to answer the phone, because there was a true family emergency…
I careened to a stop and wrested the phone from my shirt. I couldn’t get it to work at all. It seemed to be trying to revert to original settings. I begged it not to.
It said, “Portrait. Landscape. Back Button. Home.”
For sure, I agreed it would be best to get home.
I tried to turn it off.
It said, “Off button.”
I said, “I know. just do it.”
But it refused.
I hustled home, then went to the Verizon store. They diagnosed Blind Mode, when a phone decides that its owner is blind. My vision is not that good, but blind may be pushing it a bit.
I bought a new phone which promised to trust my eyesight.. But the Young Frankenstein procedure, in which the two phones, Old and New, lie on adjoining gurneys and the brains are transferred from Old to New, didn’t go quite as hoped. Brain transfer yielded only 1452 pictures. The rest were nowhere. Not the Cloud, nowhere. My phone ate them, and I had been ignoring warnings that my Cloud was full. Everyone knows that when clouds are full, they rain.
Since the operation failed, I have retrieved a few of my favorite shots from Facebook and from among photos I had emailed to family, and I am thankful for 50inthefifties, which survived.
But…Photos of my dad. ..My daughter’s graduation… I have a few; I lost a lot. All of 2016, in fact.
It’s my own damn fault. What a fool. With time, I have accepted this, but it was a shocking loss on the day.
There are so many worse things. Moving on. Making memories, taking photos, not beating myself up over it.
I’ll make better choices next time. I guess I should have known when the phone started taking pictures on its own from inside my cycling shirt that something was amiss…