Those Trying-To-figure-out-a-New-phone blues
Like many of us, I sometimes have a love-hate relationship with tech. And right now, I’m hating.
But I’m not a Luddite, really.
Like many of us, I marvel at the ability to zoom with someone on the other side of the world. I am pleasantly flabbergasted at being able to FaceTime from a Greek island and enthralled that I can listen to any music I want to listen to whenever I want to listen to it.
I am thrilled I can look up the name of the co-star of 1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” when I can’t think of it and I’m really happy I can post photos of my beach trip that anyone can be jealous of and yes, I’m very grateful I can help create a blog where people can see what I write and I can read what others of my generation have to say.
Unlike some of our contemporaries who still note their upcoming appointments on small notepads, or on scraps of papers they later can’t find, I don’t know how I could survive without that calendar embedded in that tiny machine in my pocket. And I don’t know how I could do that writing if I was still typing away on my Olivetti Lettera 32 and cutting and pasting meant actual cutting and pasting.
Nor am I, I hope, the caricature of the boomer who needs to call the grandkids to find out how voicemail works or how you scan a QR code or who still pays all his bills by paper checks. I am fully committed to the new world and reasonably comfortable within it.
(It is true that I do still have a turntable and a VCR, but that’s only because I still do have record albums and videotapes. However, I more often listen to Spotify and I rarely watch the tapes because I’m too busy checking out Instagram and posting on Threads.)
And yet. And still.
After seven or so years of fierce bonding with my iPhone, I bought a new model the other day. It’s a better model—longer battery life, faster processing speed, improved camera, more gigabytes, as if I know what those are.
But in addition, it’s also different. Stuff is in different places from where they used to be. Stuff operates differently than it used to operate. Stuff needs to be set up anew after seven years of being taken for granted and done automatically.
I have to figure out what are the passwords for places where I haven’t had to use passwords in many years. I have to figure out how to synch my watch with an app although I no longer have any idea how to synch my watch with that app. It always just worked. I have to figure out how to transfer accounts and data and information from a home I knew well, where I was comfortably ensconced, to a foreboding, complicated new residence.
Adjusting to the new phone reminds me that the scariest sentence in the English language remains an update is coming—don’t shut down. I don’t need the new IOS 17.6 or the new Windows 11.4. I want what I already have and what I worked so hard to understand.
Yes, I know these updates and improvements and new models are making things better. But after all the time it’s taken me to finally get up to speed and make my peace with technology, please stop changing it.