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If you’re like me and blog from your phone, you probably have to do a good bit of proofreading.
I doubt I’ve ever typed out a full post without errors, be they mine or my iPhone’s predictive text.
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Case in point… I was just writing about a Go Fund Me page which my keyboard changed to Ho find me.
Sorry Apple.
But I don’t need a Ho.
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I like new tech. My husband? Not so much. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that my husband uses his cell phone as … don’t faint… an actual phone. You know, to speak with people like we did in the old days before texting was invented and we didn’t have to.
His phone was old. Moldy green cheese old. It was an iPhone 4 he bought in 2010… we’re talking the tech equivalent of a dinosaur fossil. It didn’t matter that it couldn’t be updated, that the battery had to be charged every few hours, that the home button stuck more often than not or that the display was blurry and dark. He liked it because he was used to it and fears new technology in general. No matter how many times times I encouraged him to trade it, he refused.
Until last week when we got a letter from Verizon Wireless saying they’ll be switching to a 5G network on December 31rst and my husband’s beloved antiquated phone will cease to exist. Kaput. Dead. Bye bye. Needless to say the other half wasn’t pleased and railed against the injustice of obsolete tech for hours on end.
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Cool typewriter aside, Verizon was doing just that, so I dragged my sputtering husband to the Verizon store the next day to upgrade his phone before the rush caused a stock shortage. And believe me, he sputtered. He sputtered on the drive there, he sputtered to the other customers, he sputtered to the sales associate, he sputtered to the check out girl and he sputtered on the drive home. Why he was sputtering when we managed to snag a great deal I’m sure I don’t know. The man just likes to sputter.
His old iPhone was worth exactly nothing, but they gave him a $700 credit, with which he bought the new iPhone 13 …. price tag $800. $100 for a new phone? Sweet! And because the deal was so good? I traded in my XR on the 13 Pro Max and only paid $200 for a $1,300 phone. Even sweeter! And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better? I learned our bill will be $24 less a month.
Score!
Does the husband like his new phone? After an hour of very patient instruction from yours truly, he wouldn’t give me the satisfaction… but I think he loves it. And I hope that’s true, because Lord knows he’ll probably keep it until 2034.
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There are many reasons I choose to blog from my iPhone instead of my computer.
#1. Since we live in rural Maine… land of slow as molasses internet service… it’s quicker.
#2. It’s portable, I can blog wherever I want and don’t need to be stuck behind my desk.
#3. I take most of my pictures with my phone so it’s easier to plop them in posts.
But the 4th and most important reason I rarely blog from my computer?
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Lord Dudley Mountcatten, who sees no earthly reason why he shouldn’t sit right in front of the screen two seconds after I turn it on.
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Attention must be paid.
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Who’s Pete? And why are we always calling him out…
Never mind. I’m actually here to gripe about my phone’s autocorrect.
Because in the past month, every time I type for it gets changed to fur.
Every. Single. Time.
Don’t get me wrong, predictive text rocks. And I’ve trained mine to spit out Mountcatten when it isn’t even a word.
But I don’t text about fur.
I don’t email about fur.
I don’t blog about fur.
(Which ironically, now that I want to… keeps changing to fir.)
So WTH?
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If you have predictive text on your cell phone, grab it and let’s play.
Remember The Princess Bride movie?
No, I don’t either. But apparently there’s a quotable line from the film that goes like this….
So a Facebook friend of mine tagged me to play the 2020 version.
Start texting My name is…..
You killed my….
Prepare to….
And let predictive text do the rest.
My results:
My name is not the big barn. ( seriously, that’s what I got! )
You killed my husband and he didn’t even know. ( it’s true he’s not very observant, but still. )
Prepare to be a little more than the kale. ( I seriously hope I’m a lot more than that foul weed. )
Not kidding, that’s what it said.
Apparently my iPhone is freakishly tuned in to my life.
Which if I stopped laughing, might make me a little worried.
I have an iPhone.
( If you don’t watch Game of Thrones? Never mind)
And with the iPhone comes Apple news, which I check from time to time for breaking stories.
And may I just say…. what’s passing for news these days is beyond ridiculous.
Roll over Edward R. Murrow, it’s a Kardashian filled world now.
And they want everyone to see their butts.
This picture was in my news feed.
Why? I have no idea.
But it made me realize…
Damn.
I’ve been doing Sundays wrong for years.
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?
River's world..... 