A friend of mine blogged today about how she would love to renounce technology for a day and as she put it "give myself permission to step back in time 15 years when
I feel like it and unplug from the world." Because she is a true friend, and we all know that "everything seems greener" on the other side, I shared my tale of whoa with her. I will now share it with you all too, least you start having nostalgic feelings of your pre-technology days because, as I found out first hand, going back is truly not as appealing as it may sometimes sound. My Blackberry just died one day, no warning, just suddenly nothing worked except the W and Q keys. That's it. By day's end when I took its sad little body to Sprint for help, it could do nothing but powerup. The latest and greatest, the new Q10 is scheduled to come out sometime this spring [note: at press time a firm launch date in the US has still not been announced], so the Sprint rep convinced me to just transfer to an old phone, any old phone I might have lying around, and wait for this new modern miracle to arrive, otherwise I would lock myself into a year contract with its soon-to-be outdated replacement. I think he saw my 6 year old BB Curve and didn't dare put me into anything with a potentially short shelf life, wisely understanding how I hang onto things as long as humanly and technologically possible. So I took his advice (after much angst), found an old flip phone and had them transfer over contacts. Sadly, the flip phone only held the first 300 of my contacts which got me to "ja". Even my husband didn't make the cut.
My whole life was in that Blackberry, my contacts, my calendar, my notes to myself, my music, my pictures and trapeze videos. Everything, hanging in the balance. I kept the now dead, except its precious brain, BB on life support, charging, and tried to limp along with a phone that was just that and not much more. The phone couldn't email, couldn't text - well, efficiently anyway because you had to tap the #7 key four freakin' times just to type a single "s" - I couldn't check friends Facebook pages or update my own status. I couldn't use GPS to get me where I needed to go, I couldn't use my Starbucks app to pay or find out the nearest Starbucks when I was outside my usual haunts or Google the definition of a word that popped into my head. I was a girl lost!
I eventually gave in and bought a used BB Curve off Amazon, same make/model as my old one, except dark grey instead of red (sort of sexy, I now think). It functions exactly the same. Well, it did after they transferred ALL of my contacts and much of my other stored data from the brain of my dearly departed. I had made it, I was back on the grid! And it was the worst two weeks of my life in recent memory. Just ask my poor husband who had to listen to me moan and cry the entire time I was unplugged from the world.
