Back to Life in a Technical Sense

 As I drove away from the repair shop with the news that my old iPhone was dead, I felt sad that I had lost such a nice (up until now) reliable piece of equipment that had served me well through so many years, and let me take tens of thousands of photographs of examples of so many languages.

It was just a phone, of course. It is nothing compared to serious losses. But I felt twinges of sadness thinking that the phone still had old messages on it from my mother when she was alive, and photographs of both my parents in the camera roll.

I would get a new phone, of course, but it wouldn't have these things on it. 

I was wrong, as it turned out. I upgrade my phone so infrequently that I didn't realize how things work now.

Ginger had already asked me if I wanted to have her old iPhone, as she wanted to get a brand new one. Hers was barely less old than mine, an iPhone 6 which came out just a few months after I bought mine in 2014. It was bigger and allowed for a more recent updates of support from Apple. She had treated it well but she wanted a new one.

I had agreed to this previously, although we had not acted on. A couple times she had almost gone to the Apple store on a whim to buy a new one. When I got home I told her the situation, and we agreed that she would get a new phone that day at the Apple store, and I could use her old one. 

I didn't know how things worked, with changing phones. Would my phone number work in the new one. I had never changed a SIM card before. It was time to learn how these things work.

Within a half hour, she had bought a brand new phone online and scheduled to pick it up at the Apple store in north Scottsdale, at the fancy shopping center called Scottsdale Quarter. We drove there and parked and then stood in the hot sun with our masks on (as it was required in order to stand in line). Finally her name was called and we got to go inside briefly to get her new one. 

Back home she set up her new phone. She had to call her phone company to activate the new SIM card. I used the small tool to pop out the drawer and put the SIM card inside. It worked seamlessly. I felt like I was catching up to the world.

As for using her phone, the joke was on me. All it took was putting my old T-Mobile SIM card into her wiped old phone. After a brief set-up, my old phone came back to life, complete with all my messages and the same background screen that my niece had taken doing a funny face into the camera.  It was almost too easy.

I felt silly at how much I had fretted about the transfer to the new phone. But now I was an expert. 

Give me another SIM card to install, I wanted to say.