Praise
be! Behold, my telephone hath been
restored unto me!
The
language used for that last sentence fits the sense of renewed faith that comes
with being plugged into whatever electronic systems I have been missing over
the Days of Isolation through which I have had to live. And please do not say that the 38 euro thing
that I bought to ‘tide me over’ did anything so much. To be fair I am astonished by just how much
such a cheap phone was able to accomplish, but it wasn’t my faithful old
Yotaphone.
It was
given back to me this morning; some sort of chip having been replaced and it is
now in full working order. Except . . .
.
Except,
while the phone works, some things are missing.
Like all the apps that I added and the photos stored (I assumed) somewhere
or other on the sim or in the cloud, somewhere, anywhere.
It’s
a bit like beginning to walk again. You
progress step by step. You have your
basic phone and a lot of space on the main page where lots of little icons used
to lurk. Some of the replacements were
easy to decide on: Reverso (my
translation app); The Guardian (once
a Guardian reader always a Guardian reader); Radio 4 (to question the need for this one argues that you wouldn’t
understand the answer and that you were a poltroon); WhatsApp (people send things and they expect me to read them, and I
do try, honestly!). Other apps will be
found when I need them, or to put it in the way that Toni described it, “You’ll
get them when you find they aren’t there!”
Which is almost philosophical and probably counts for a lot of the time
spent on computers as we try and find what isn’t there.
In
the bad old days (I now understand that means anything over 5 years ago), no,
the really bad old days when there was no internet, no wi-fi and virtually not
on-board memory, you really did have to search for things that you thought that
you had done, but you had made a tiny mistake in the file name or file type or
where you put it and it was well and truly gone. Like the books in the British Library that I
was told had a shelf number as their identifying place in the system, which
meant that if a book was replaced incorrectly then there was a real chance that
it would never be found again, except by pure chance! Sometimes it felt with early computers that,
whatever we were told about the cold logic of our machines, they were actually
motivated by a malevolent maliciousness that works ceaselessly against us.
So
with my revived phone. It felt as if
things had been intentionally hidden.
For example the photographs I had taken.
On the photo app on the phone there were no ‘taken’ photographs, all the
photos had gone. Somewhere. And, sure enough, over the next few hours, I
found a photo, and then a whole slew of photos emerge from the electronic mists
and retake their places. They are there,
but I don’t seem to be able to access them from the camera. That too will change, I’m sure.
And,
a I’ve been typing, I have realized that there is another app that I can’t do
without, that of Kindle. This is the app
that uses the second face of my phone, so that I can read easily in black and
white, and in the sunshine too. And even
as I type it is syncing my information and all my books are now only a touch
away!
Everyone
should go through the trauma of ‘losing’ their phone, if only for the delight
and satisfaction in ‘restoring’ a life!
