Last night I clicked something on my phone that caused it to reboot, only it never fully rebooted itself. I tried waiting, but when the progress bar didn't move for five minutes I tried a soft reset. Again, the progress bar stopped about two thirds of the way and never moved so I tried a battery pull, and again to no avail. By this time I was getting rather antsy, because Barry v.2 had barely been with me for a month. I started thinking about warranties and how long he'd be out of service for if I couldn't get him back up and running that night. By this time I was fully awake (but still tired) and had gone to the length of bringing Original Barry out and charging him- not having a phone for one night while I would be alseep? Perish the thought! Then I started thinking about all the flack that I'd get from the many iPhone users that I would be having brunch with the next day, and I knew that I had to get Barry v.2 back in functional order before I could even consider trying to sleep again (did I mention this was all taking place around one in the morning?).
Thankfully, my problem solving skills were still functioning and the thought of somehow "jumpstarting" Barry from the desktop manager, so I quietly plodded out to the hall to fetch Mac. I stumbled onto my mostly unsuspecting housemate in the living room, but that's another story for another day. Armed with Mac and a USB cable I began Operation Rescue Barry. After a few minutes it became clear that his whole OS had been corrupted, so I had to reinstall his OS and restore all previous data, which took a good half hour. Luckily for me the polar bear stumbled online and we ended up having an hour long chat (read: me whining and getting all worked up about..work and him being all supportive and warm and cuddly but just not within my reach dammit) so before I knew it presto Barry v.2 was fully functional and I was ready to hit the sack since it was coming to four thirty in the morning and I had to be at Vic Market in six and a half hours (did not mention this in our conversation because I'm pretty sure that would mean I would be seeing a lot more of the disapproving polar bear). All that remained was for me to reinstall and reauthorise all the applications again, set up my email inbox deliveries again and adjust some of settings again. That's when I noticed that my social feeds application was gone and I couldn't locate it in blackberry's app world and what did I say about getting some sleep?
So why did I go through all this? Was getting Barry just to avoid being ridiculed by a couple of iPhone users? Hardly. I'm sorry but it's hard for me to take your jibes seriously when all my brunch companions have had their iPhones replaced (numerous times; one of them is on her sixth iPhone of the same model) due to shattered screens (after being dropped from a grand height of thirty centimetres), microphones not working, software bugs..well you get the picture. You want to make fun of software? I still say mine's more reliable and less buggy, albeit less flashy. At least I could solve my own problem, in my own bedroom at three in the morning.
Was it because I didn't want to have to go back to poor, laggy Original Barry? Partially yes. I have to admit, I had gotten used to a highly responsive piece of technology that doesn't make me wait for two minutes to load my text messages, cause me to miss calls because it's lagging so badly or needed to be reset every so often. The thought that I would have to put up with that again even if for a few days frustrated me. Thats the thing about technological advancements; once you get comfortable with something new, everything else that came before it is now rendered obsolete. How did you get by on that old brick, you wonder. No, there's no such thing as going back.
But that's not the main reason. The main reason was just a minute before I clicked that fateful app I was texting the very bear I later ended up talking to via Skype (totally unplanned, honest!) and really really needed to know if he replied yet, because I hate it when technology fails and I didn't want to be left wondering all night, y'know? That terrible gnawing feeling of being suddenly, unexpectedly, cut off without being sure if you got the full message or not and knowing that you are unable to receive any more. What if it was important? What if I miss something and it alters the chain of events? What if..? What??
So yeah, long story short: I went to sleep really late last night because I needed to fix my phone to see if my boyfriend had replied a text message. Over dependency on technology you say? I think so.
PS He didn't. 