Buying a New Brain Is a Pain

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I bought a new iPhone on New Year’s Eve, after months of pondering whether I wanted to A) spend the money and B) deal with the inevitable pain of swapping out what is, in essence, my brain’s external hard drive. My actual brain’s disk is full, so without a smart phone I would be, well, even dumber than I am. The tipping point was that my four-year-old phone would not run the software for the drone I received for Christmas. More on that later. I’m still sussing through exactly how to fly this drone and use it to take photos and make videos.

Anyway, a phone upgrade required sacrificing most of a weekend to the process, from actually buying the phone to transferring the contents of the old phone to the new device. This required a couple trips to the AT&T store, a moderate number of muttered curses, and hours of painstakingly upgrading apps, getting rid of items never used, trying to recall passwords, or creating new ones.

For a few hours, I was effectively Out Of Touch, as my new phone attempted to copy the contents from the backup I had created on my Mac. I briefly panicked. What if someone was trying to get hold of me? A missed email, text message or phone call?

I quickly got over myself. It was Saturday morning, Dec. 31. My Beautiful Mystery Companion and daughter were home. I was going to survive being Out Of Touch for a while. I am definitely Not That Important.

For the first 40 or so years of my life, I was not always reachable 24-7. When I was in a vehicle, or out of the office or home, it was not possible for someone to contact me. Listen up, young people. Until the early-to-mid 1990s, most folks had neither cell phones nor email. Or if they had email, it was only accessible from their desk-bound computer. And a cell phone came with a bulky bag and a magnetic antenna stuck to the vehicle’s roof. Nobody “checked in” via social media that he was about to chow down at Five Guys Hamburgers.

I miss those days. Not that I check in where I’m eating.
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So, I successfully transferred all my stuff to the new iPhone, which is the size of a small television. There was one major glitch, likely the result of operator error. Somehow, my contacts — the list of folks I keep in my address book to call or email — merged with my email account. The result was that anyone who had emailed me or called, or vice versa, in the past 15 years was added to my contact list. Suddenly, to get to someone whose name starts with “T” required scrolling through hundreds of listings. I found an app to get rid of much of the duplication, but I was forced to scroll through and delete several hundred jacked-up contacts. Somebody I had emailed once years ago often was listed with 12 separate addresses. It was a mess.

It took hours. I divided the alphabet up into four sessions. This is the part of technology that makes me grit teeth, calculating the hours off my life spent doing mindless grunt work on a computer screen. For years, I kept an address book that fit in my briefcase, its pages well-worn, old addresses scratched out. Same with my calendar, which was a tiny book that fit in my pants pocket. Now, I am held hostage to an expensive — though amazing — device that supplements my brain.
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While cleaning up my contact list, I came across absent friends and colleagues, folks who have died in the past several years. I counted seven who had passed away, and deleting their contacts was poignant. I won’t delve into who these folks were, so as not to reopen old wounds. Let’s just say it made me aware of the days passing in a rush, the fragility of life, the need to appreciate what time is left — for me, for you, for all of us.

I just hope I don’t spend much more of it updating a phone. I would rather be outside, hiking down a trail or riding a bike. Or sitting by the fire reading a book.

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