How (not) to spend a beautiful June afternoon

We've been having a pretty nice June - blue skies, sunny days, mildly breezy. Plus light well into the evening. What's not to like? 

Because we've had so many pretty nice June days, I didn't have anything in particular planned for that one pretty nice June day. Just walking around, enjoying the weather, sitting on a bench on The Esplanade watching sailboats on the Charles, feeling bad for my friends in Dallas who're in the midst of a Texas-size horror heat wave. (I was supposed to be visiting them, but game called on account of heat.)

Well, whatever it was I was or wasn't planning to do, the plan sure wasn't to spend all afternoon acquiring and setting up a new phone. But that's exactly what happened.

Admittedly, my old (as it is now known) phone was no longer living its best life. Phone calls kept breaking up, other than when I was wearing headphones. And sometimes even then. The battery life was starting to sap away far too quickly. I'd dropped it on its head so many times, it's amazing it was working at all. I knew that its time was nearing. And then I made the final, fatal drop that hastened its demise.

This was a face down splat, and when I picked it up, there was a thick black section at the bottom left of the screen. 

Occasionally, I'm an optimist, and this was one of those times when I was being one. I turned off the phone, fingers crossed, hoping against hope that I could jolly it back into full display.

Not exactly.

What happened is that it turned on to an entirely blacked out display that stayed entirely blacked out for five minutes, before restoring everything but that one thick black section at the bottom left of the screen. 

On my laptop, I googled. Not good news. Blacked out screen like the one I was experiencing is the phone equivalent of nag to the glue factory.

So, off to the Verizon Store, where a perfectly pleasant and helpful young woman named Jazzmine perfectly pleasantly helped me out.

No Apple for me, thankyou. So why not a Samsung Galaxy 22 to replace my ailing Samsung Galaxy S10? Bonus: 5G!

I couldn't quite understand why the cost to pay upfront is the same as paying monthly over three years. I figured there'd be some discount. Alas, there wasn't. So even though it made no economic sense to pay upfront, I went ahead - using a credit card that gets me frequent flyer miles. (My husband would be so proud.)

In the past, the Verizon Store has done the honors of transferring contacts and apps, but they no longer do so. But Jazzmine assured me that with Google everything just transfers over without a hitch. Right... (Right???)

Inevitably, there was a hitch.

I have two-factor authentication set up on my Google account, and it wanted to send that pesky old second authenticating factor to my old phone. Which was no longer working well enough to get the notice.

I was packing up and preparing to head back to Verizon to bleat out my tale of woe, when it dawned on me that, since I had set up two factor authentication, I could remove it. Which I was able to do on my laptop. Second factor, begone!

That out of the way, I went to see what exactly had transferred over to my new phone. I was most concerned about my contacts.

The contacts kinda sorta made it. But not fully and pretty weirdly, and I can't figure out the algo that did the picking and choosing. 

Neither of the Betsey's on my contact list - my sister-in-law and a neighbor - made it over. Only one of the two Toms made the cut. My brother Tom was in there; my client Tom wasn't. Same with the Ricks. Brother-in-law Rick: YES. Brother Rick: NO. Friend Mary Beth: YES; cousin Mary Beth NO. Both Kathleens: good to go! Tim, Paul, Bob: friends from the gym. Kersplat!

There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why some contact info transferred over while other info didn't.

Some of the people I text with most frequently disappeared on me. Other names appeared and I had to stop for a minute to remember exactly who they were. Madeline L? I think I was in a writers' group with her 10 years ago. Maybe. But why did I ever have her number? And who is Jessica F? Oh, yeah, she was the student writing a paper about Christmas in the City (a charity I'm involved with). 

Fortunately, although it took quite a while for the screen to unblack, I could access the contacts on my old phone and copy over the ones that were missing. And I took the opportunity to get rid of those contacts that are so ancient I can barely recall who they are. But I couldn't bring myself to delete my friend Jake's number, even though Jake's been dead now for almost two years. 

Regrettably, I lost my old message strings, so don't have the last text I got from him, shortly before the ALS that killed him really set in. 

All my photos came to me. But the apps were pretty erratic. Some bounced right on over, others I needed to reinstall. For some things, I didn't need to re-enter the password. For others, I was starting from scratch.

And let me tell you, Uber defaults to thinking that you want to be a driver. 

The final hoohah was setting up the Authenticator app, which one of my client requires. (I have an email address with them, and access to their internal systems, so they require a bit more security.) It involved getting their IT group involved, but other than a moment or two of aggravation, it worked out.

So it's all good now. I've got what I need on there. And I uninstalled some of the unwanted apps that Samsung lards their phones up with. (No, I'm never going to play Candy Crush.)

There are some improvements. The phone calls are more clear. And I like having the rotating screen backgrounds (landscapes and flowers). 

Other than that, meh: it's a (pricey) smartphone.

And I can't help but feeling a bit wistful for the less manic, info-bombarding, 24/7, instant-everything era when you never had to worry about whether your Bakelite rotary dial phone was going to punk out on you. (Two factor authentication? Hello, Central.)