November 24, 2017 by Amy

Tech times three

Just like celebrity deaths, technology woes come in threes. Which is always fun since technology is so inexpensive to replace/repair and since it’s always so easy to work with.

Tech Issue #1:

I’ve been dealing with battery issues on my iPhone for a few weeks. I’ve tried some remedies found by poking around on the internets, and nothing has fixed it. I decided to make an appointment with the fine people at my local Apple store to see if they can tell me what the fritz is going on. My theory is that it has to do with the new iOS, because I had zero battery issues before the update, and nothing but battery issues since. It could be coincidence, but I like to have something to blame. I made my appointment online for tomorrow at 6:15 p.m. The confirmation email reminded me to do a full back-up before coming in. Gotcha. I know they recommend backing up because their favorite way of trying to fix gear is to flat-line it and see if it works better. So I took my iPhone and its USB cord into my office and plugged it into my big ol’ iMac, where I’ve backed up my phones before. Easy peasy, right?

Tech Issue #2:

My big ol’ iMac is full. I mean, it’s bursting at the gills. I’ve known this for awhile, and have spent time here and there cleaning out bloated folders. It’s pain to go through all the images I’ve shot to cull them down. I’ve spent hours dumping thousands of images and it has barely made a dent. I have photos from months ago still on the card in my camera that I haven’t even uploaded to the computer yet because of space issues. A couple months ago one of my photography friends posted on Facebook that she was ditching her trusty iMac to upgrade to a new iMac, primarily due to space issues. The old iMac in her picture looked identical to mine. Then her friend commented that she was about ready to upgrade her 10-year-old iMac as well. I wondered how old mine is, and checked. It’s a “Late 2009” model. Holy crap. Had no idea my computer was so old. Well, I’m not in the market to buy a new computer for photography just yet, so I figured I’d keep on deleting and freeing up space. Spent more hours cleaning things out. Then today, I went to plug in my iPhone to back it up, and there’s not even enough space to do that. Shit. As I was deleting more and more files, M wandered in. Once he learned what I was doing, he went into full fix-it mode and started researching external drives and new computers. I love that man.

Tech Issue #3:

We discovered last night that the screen on Zoe’s iPhone is loose. Really loose. We’re handling it with kid gloves because we’re afraid it’s going to pop off entirely any second now. I know there are kiosks in the mall that replace/repair screens, so our original thought was to do that. Until we realized we’d be putting money into an iPhone 5 that can no longer be updated, and that’s estranged from all of our other technology anyway due to an iCloud hack that M suffered last year, which is a whole ‘nother story.

So my tech trifecta can be summed up with this: an overloaded iMac and two bum iPhones.

After spending way too much time talking and researching and discussing and generally beating it all to death, we decided on this course of action:

1. Upgrade iCloud storage to a family plan that we can all share, that is large enough to handle both my family’s reasonable phone storage and my insane iPhone photography files. I’m not too concerned because it’s a whopping $3 per month. Small price to pay to support my addiction photography habit.
2. Back up my iPhone and its obscene amount of photographs to the new storage plan, so it can be flat-lined at the Apple store tomorrow, which we are hoping will fix the battery issue.
3. I get a new iPhone (with crazy amounts of memory, thank you), and Zoe takes my (hopefully) rejuvenated 6s.
4. M is going to discuss external drive options for my iMac with the Apple guys tomorrow, but our thought is to buy a ginormous drive with a RAID (redundant array of independent disks, yo), dump all my files onto that and use it as an archive plus back-up, and free up space on my iMac which works wonderfully when it isn’t bogged down with a hundred bazillion photographs.

I wish I could tell you that getting to this plan was easy, but nooooo. We had to debate and discuss and hem and haw and argue and make up and pout and sulk and, at one point, dig up our internet bill to see how fast our current internet service is because somehow even that became part of our discussion. (And this, too, was complicated, because I forgot I went to paperless billing a year ago and so had no hard copy to show him, which involved logging on to AT&T only to realize that he gave me the login and password for my wireless account, not our internet account, which was another argument, until I figured it out and got in and pulled up the bill which didn’t have the internet speed on it anyway but I found it elsewhere on the site so crisis averted. Except for the argument involving “Why don’t you review the bill every month” and “Why should I review it every month when the damn thing hasn’t changed in a year? When it’s the same amount every single month, nothing has changed, so what’s the point of looking it over again and again?”)

It was a fantastic time, I tell ya.

Then I went outside and raked up all the shit from the neighbor’s tree (they aren’t leaves…they are these rust-colored spiny needle things that go freaking everywhere) because his idea of cleaning up his yard is to do it so infrequently that most of it blows into my (treeless) yard. I was thisclose to firing up the leaf blower and blowing all that shit right back across the property line but M wouldn’t let me. I’m guessing that a similar argument over red spiny things is why Rand Paul’s neighbor tackled him, because if I’d have seen my neighbor today I’d probably be writing this from jail right now. This is why it’s a good thing I am married to M. He keeps me out of jail.

So, wish me luck tomorrow, because given that we’re dealing with technology, our carefully outlined plan will surely be shot to hell within twenty seconds of our entering the Apple store.

Aren’t there some celebrities about ready to pop off?

#blog#M#personal essay#photography#technology#writing