7820/20761
Months ago my iPhone fell out of my pocket when I was getting out of the car and crunched against the tarmac, taking a tiny chunk of glass out of the screen and adding a hairline crack. but it still worked and I just lived with it, but after my slightly cracked Apple watch went kaput when I went swimming with it on in Centerparcs I was very careful to keep the phone away from water. Recently I've been thinking I should get the glass repaired. In fact I was thinking about that whilst I played Uno on the phone in the bath this afternoon. So when I say I was careful to keep it away from water I mean i didn't dunk it in the bath water.
I put the phone on the shelf at the side so I could wash my hair, but it was leaning against something and slipped. I managed to catch it - I thought probably in time, though maybe the end had caught the water. The end with the bit missing. Was it OK? Yes, it seemed to be working fine. Phew. That was close. And just after I'd been thinking of this exact thing happening. I am the low rent Nostradamus.
It was a couple of hours later when I was scrolling through Twitter that something weird started to happen. The screen flashed a bit and then the top quarter turned green and then white and sparkly and then the whole screen turned green. I was worried I was being hacked, having forgotten about the bath incident, and tried to turn the phone off. It made an alarming noise of a siren and the flash light flashed. I couldn't turn the thing off. Was someone accessing my data? Was my life about to be taken over by a Russian bot factory? Were all my secrets about to be exposed?
I slowly worked out that it might be more to do with the dunking than spies - thank goodness, my secrets are so boring that it would destroy my reputation if they came out. I tried, too late perhaps, dunking the phone in rice, but each time I tried to access it for the rest of the day the situation got worse. It was still on and still making the occasional sounds - it rang if you rang it - but I think it's game over for another phone. Which is bitter sweet due to the expense of replacement, versus the excitement of upgrading.
I am very much addicted to my phone and so being without it for the rest of the day was a bit concerning but mainly liberating. My watch can receive phone calls and I can play my audio books through it so I wasn't completely lost, but when I took my daughter to football I had to watch her play rather than play games and whilst I can tweet from my computer, I don't have that with me all the time. I was free. Might I be able to live a phone free life?
I mean obviously I'm not going to, but I found it strange that the freedom it gave me outweighed the withdrawal and mild panic every time I realised I didn't have my phone, before remembering it was in a bowl of rice. I do waste a lot of time on the phone, even though there are some seemingly essential tools on there that I need for work. Are we better or worse off with these devices? Or are our lives just different with them? They are so incredible and amazing and would blow the minds of nearly every human who ever lived - including the younger me, that's how rapid their ascent has been.
But for now I am enjoying not having instant access all the time to the internet and time-eating games and looking at my kids faces and interacting with them. Well I would be if they weren't always on their devices. I wonder if this is the future or whether this horrible time of screens and toxic social media will be seen as a blip in the history of humanity. Not very confident that there will be many humans around to have a history though.
