Last week I obsessed majorly over what was going on in Boston.
Besides the fact that it’s my home state, I lived in Boston for a very formative year of my life and have many good friends there. So I got into a bit of a tailspin loading and reloading the news and Twitter over and over again to see if there were any updates. Between my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone I was spectacularly connected from within a minute of waking up until seconds before falling asleep every night.
As a result of the emotional exhaustion and the internet overload, I was really craving a break from every information source by Friday night—not to mention that my thumb was starting to hurt from manipulating my iPhone one-handed. I dreamed of turning off all my devices for the weekend and taking a brief sabbatical from technology. It was a beautiful weekend here in Northern California and I could easily have spent the entire thing outside.
Not to be dramatical, but this is where I live.
But it was not to be.
I was having a problem getting my iPhone to sync to iCal and it was starting to be detrimental to the ease of my work life. I made an appointment at the Genius Bar to get it figured out on Saturday afternoon. That was my first mistake:
When hoping to take a weekend off from technology, maybe don’t make an appointment at the Genius Bar.
During my genius bar visit, it was decided (by me, exclusively) that getting a new iPhone would probably solve the problem, and besides, I was due for a new phone, having not lost, broken or hurled a phone against a wall in almost two straight years. So I splurged and got an iPhone5. It didn’t solve the problem. It actually created way, way, way more problems. My new iPhone 5 is way faster, bigger and shinier and doesn’t have that nasty crack across the screen. It also:
- Won’t download email.
- Cost a bunch more than it was supposed to cuz I had to buy all new chargers and a new case, since Apple insidiously changed all the specs from the 4.
- Hahaha still doesn’t sync to iCal—a native Mac program, mind you.
Oh, and for a really complicated and inane bevy of reasons that I won’t bother getting into here, because I care about you and your time too much, buying a new iPhone unleashed a sequence of events that caused me to lose all my email data from the past 18 years, corrupted my external hard drive, and rendered all three of my browser options completely inoperable as far as getting on the internet is concerned. I went to an appointment with the Genius Bar on Saturday afternoon, and I spent virtually the next 36 hours dealing with technical mayhem, while the sun shined ruthlessly outside, beholden to no one.
The point is (who cares), I actually did not lose my temper once. Because I am a half-assed Buddhist. And while I really rely on my computer to work well and am in absolute professional peril if it doesn’t, I also am keenly aware that so life goes. When one spends most of ones life wired, one encounters major glitches here and there. A sunny weekend spend in front of my keyboard is a small price to pay for the ultimate freedom I experience as a freelancer (and as an American, a lesson I take even more to heart in light of the stories behind what happened in Boston).
