Do you ever wonder, “Why does this crap always happen to me?”

It seems to be the story of my life. When I had a simple hospital procedure that you can go home an hour after completion? I started to bleed out, set off a code blue and heard the doctor say,

When my new car died unexpectedly a week after I bought it and had to be towed to the shop? It sat there for days because no one could figure what was wrong. The mechanics all said,

Yes. I’m the girl who goes to a party, bellies up to the buffet line… only to have the table leg collapse and crash onto her foot.

To which the host replied….

So when I went to Verizon to buy a new cell phone last week, I should have known things would not go smoothly. I chose the iPhone XR, and the tech set it up for me with no problem.

By the next day? Problem.

I think we’ve established the fact that I take a lot of pictures. And while I always upload them to my computer, I do tend to keep a lot on the phone itself. (Okay, I keep thousands of pictures. But I have the storage capacity, so who cares?)

My new phone was happily restoring from iCloud  when I got home, until it wasn’t. It froze after loading less than half my pics. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I kept getting an alert message saying my storage was almost full. What? 9,304 pics on my iPhone 6 took up 2.2g of space… and now the newer,  expensive A.F.  better XR is saying 3,708 pics are taking up over 50g? Not possible.

So I gave it a few more days but nothing changed. Which led me to live chat with Apple support for 3 hours on a Sunday. I went through 5 different techs, a supervisor, and a senior advisor. Boy, that was  like having a hot sauce enema  fun. None of them knew what was going on… and to a man all said,

They even had a specialist call me on the phone and try to walk me through solutions remotely. Nothing. He kept telling me to download the new software…. which you can’t do if it’s actively restoring. When he tried to force it through my computer, the session timed out.

I know we have a broadband connection out here in Boonsville, but still,

The Apple geniuses were stumped. And I wasn’t pleased.

The specialist basically washed his hands of me, told me to take it back to Verizon and oh yeah, when I figured out what the problem was… call back and explain it to them.

Bright and early Monday morning I was at Verizon bitching up a storm, only to have their tech tell me he had over 12,000 pics on his XR and… you guessed it,

He conferred with all the other techs and they decided it was a speed and/or interruption issue. When they had set the phone up in the store it was drawing on their high speed connection, when I left the store it was drawing on my cellular data, and when I got home it was drawing on my  slow as a Wal Mart line at Christmas  broadband wifi. That’s 3 different speeds and basically there was so much being pushed…. it  said screw this went haywire. They fiddled with the phone, did some ninja warrior tech stuff I couldn’t keep up with and got the storage level back to normal at 1.47 g.  But I still only had half my pics and that was the original problem!

I was told to go home, wipe the phone completely back to default and start a new restore while on a steady, one source connection. It was also suggested I go into iCloud and delete unwanted photos. ( WTF? Is there such a thing? )

So here I sit, slogging through 9,304 iCloud pictures unhappily hitting delete at the speed of …

And you wonder why I drink?