The Lord of the Phones

Need brooks no delay but late is better than never; it’s 8:28 PM and I’m ready to blog. I hope nobody needed to read this earlier. Today you’ll hear the spellbinding tale of my new phone. Sure, the Great Ring gives you the power of dominion and makes you invisible, but my phone can give me directions, make social media posts, look things up on the Wikipedia, take pictures and even make phone calls if you can believe it. I’d much rather have that than Sauron’s Ring. I’m reasonably sure there are no curses attached to it, an added bonus. I love my phone, it’s my precioussss. This story promises to be much more exciting that Lord of the Rings.

I did not find the phone in a cave or at the bottom of a river where I was fishing. It came to me by the strange magicks of the internet. My phone service Boost Mobile wrote me and even called my phone to tell me that they were switching their network to 5G and the lesser magicks of a Galaxy S7 would no longer work. At first, they were offering me new phones for hundreds of dollars, but I held out. They finally made me an offer I can’t refuse, a refurbished S10 for $50. I needed a new phone anyway as I was running out of memory on the old one. I thought things worked out well. I ordered the phone on the Boost Website and three days later it was delivered to my door. Now I had to figure out how to get it working. There was a slip in there that said to insert the sim card then follow the directions found inside the packing label. There was no packing label and no instructions. I was able to find the directions on the Boost Website. To activate it I needed to put in a serial number. I found that on a small piece of paper in the box with bar codes. It said to use the bar codes to activate the phone, but they didn’t say how to get the phone to work to do that. On the website I had to enter the numbers. The problem is that they were written in microscopic font. I had to take a picture of it with my old phone and blow it up. There were four serial numbers on the card. The biggest and most obvious one was wrong as it was one digit too short. I tried another one but even with blowing up the picture it was not clear what the digits were. They were not printed crisply. I couldn’t distinguish 5s from 6s. It then hit me to use the bar code reader on my old phone and finally got the digits right. Great, all set. Nope, after entering the numbers I got a message saying it can’t activate the phone at this time and to try again later. I tried later. Same thing.

So now I called Boost tech support. I told her the website wasn’t working and she ignored that and said that she could activate it for me. I then said. “I’m on the phone number that I need to activate, Is that going to be a problem? She said no, not at all that she can help me. Her next question was, “Are you on the phone number you are trying to activate?” I was incredibly good; I did not jump into the phone travel to her via the network and give her a noogie. I just said, “That is exactly what I asked you about two seconds ago.” After a few more exchanges she finally understood that I was on the phone number I was trying to activate. She told me that when it was activated, we would be disconnected. I never got her to understand that I was concerned about the new phone having enough of a charge to activate it. I couldn’t just use my old charger as the new phone is USB3 and the old phone was USB2. I unpacked the new charger with the 2-foot card that could barely reach my chair and got enough charge in the phone to start. It took a long time, but she finally got it activated and I was thankfully disconnected from her.

I was so smart; I ordered a phone case that arrived day before the phone so I wouldn’t risk breaking it. I tried putting the phone in the case. The case was too big. I got a case for an S10 Plus. I didn’t notice that. I immediately bought a new phone case that protects it up to a 12-foot-drop and a pair of 6-foot USB3 chargers.

Then came the fun part, personalizing the phone. I discovered that Samsung has a thing called quick switch to move your data from one phone to another. I had to download it on my old phone, it came installed on the new one. It sent over almost all my apps, media, and preferences. Almost all, not quite all. But I have the same wallpaper, and custom ringtones. It even transferred over my alarms. Jean Rohe still wakes me up at 8 AM to Arise! Arise! I had to sign into some of my apps again thought Samsung Pass let me do much of that with my fingerprint. The toughest part to get working was Amazon music, but I finally figured it out.

I love that the new phone has facial recognition. It’s not perfect but it works often enough. When it doesn’t the fingerprint still works. I can’t wait to try out the new camera. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go out and do some photography in the neighborhood. The real test will be taking pictures indoors at a concert.

I kept the old phone on in order to see if there were apps that weren’t transferred that I still wanted. The phone isn’t attached to the network, but it is still a working pocket computer using our Wi-Fi. That was great until the morning. At 8 AM the two phones both started playing Jean at precisely the same time. Today I remembered to turn off the old phone, so it doesn’t happen again. I should take the SD card out of the old phone and install it in the new one even though it’s small compared to the new phone’s memory. The old SD like the old phone was 32 GB. The new one is 128 GB. How long will that be adequate for? Each new iteration of the operating system uses more memory than the last.

When I got the new phone working the way I liked it I thought my quest was complete. It almost was but when I got returned to bed where I keep the phone at night, I found that Saruman had taken over. I had to fight the Battle of Bywater, the last battle fought in my bed and the last since The Bullroarer, Brandobras Took defeated the orcs at the Battle of Greenfields.

I’ve already written 1183 words, so I won’t tell of the final voyage across the sea to the Undying Lands and I certainly won’t include the appendices. I know that’s the best part but it’s getting late. I think I did as I promised told a tale more exciting that the Lord of the Rings, which automatically makes it more exciting than all the Harry Potter books put together.  

Now sit back and listen to the Gord’s Gold St. Patrick’s Day Spectacular.