Can you live without your smartphone for a week, or longer? How would you contact your friends or check your bank balances? Or get the weather, the news — or text family? We do almost everything on our phones. (Let’s keep sex out of this.)
But the unavoidable can happen, as it did to me. I survived, albeit barely. Let me share.
While bicycling scenic State Road A1A in Florida, listening to an enthralling audiobook, I stopped at a traffic light. But a few seconds after I resumed riding, the audio stopped. This sometimes happens and just requires hitting “resume” on the audio app. But when I reached into my bicycling shirt rear pocket there was no phone. My new Samsung S22 Ultra had been levered out of my rear shirt pocket by the front edge of the bike seat as I resumed riding. I turned around and arrived at the intersection just in time to see the phone disappear under a car’s tires. Despite the Otterbox Defender case, the screen was just shattered.
Back at my car, I headed to the local T-Mobile store only to be told they could not fix this phone. For that matter, they couldn’t even sell me a new one without a new and expanded calling plan (which later turned out to be
not true). So I sped to Best Buy, but it no longer repairs broken phones. Finally, I stopped at a UBreak-iFix store. They said they could fix it, but the screens were backordered some weeks.
Left with no choice, I sent it back to Samsung, by overnight carrier. Three business days later, I called to inquire. They had replaced the display, but the phone failed their quality test and needed a new main circuit board: $650. Some five days later, they said that my phone had been assigned to a higher level technician. Who knew there is a hierarchy for phone repairs?
During all this, the online repair status page consistently said “under repair — no completion date.” How helpful. More days, more calls. Finally, after nearly two weeks they said the phone had been repaired and I’d receive a tracking number by email. Two days later, no email. More calls. Now they told me the phone was repaired but needed to pass their quality test. More days, still no update. Another week, and a breakthrough! They told me that the whole facility had shut down for several days because of an ice storm that struck Dallas that week.
Finally, though, after three weeks the phone was shipped. But that’s just the beginning.
Many of us grew up without smartphones and survived nicely. Not home for a call? They’d either call back or you might actually own an answering machine. Today? It is almost inconceivable not to have instant access to searching, texting, talking and shooting world-class photos — and being accessible virtually 24/7 by text or voice.
If we can’t think of a movie name, searching with a few vaguely related words gives us the entire cast and the
personal lives of each actor. How did we settle arguments before smartphones?
My missing phone was a significant disruption, tantamount to ripping out the heart of my lifestyle. Without a phone, I felt isolated. The transition today from smartphone-reliant user to phone-less status is a massive and shocking
change that can cause emotional challenges. For me, those challenges included panic and anxiety.
Certainly, the panic arising out of a car-flattened phone incident is no surprise. But the frustration of being unable to find a solution in a day or two served to worsen the overall feeling of helplessness and disconnectedness. One might think that a damaged phone could be repaired by any big-name retailer or repair facility in just about every shopping center. Not so.
After the first week, I was especially anxious as I imagined what a headache it would be to restore photos and applications, a process that was fresh in my mind from a few months earlier when I had updated from a Samsung S8.
As repair delays cascaded, my anxiety escalated. By the time the phone arrived, I was just short of apoplectic, in part because the phone had been swept clean of all data by Samsung. Would I ever be able to restore the data
and apps in the repaired phone, find the passwords, reinstall email accounts, and reload the thousands of photos without which I felt I cannot exist? Even if I ever got the phone back, how many dozens of hours would it take to
restore it to its pre-damaged state?
I felt so much dread and anxiety that I consulted my family physician, who prescribed a mild sedative to prevent me from awakening every few hours worrying and an anti-anxiety medication to help with the fear factor. These
helped, but I still worried. At least I could sleep.
Photos had been saved in the Google cloud, but when downloaded to the phone were not in the familiar Gallery folder but in a data storage location. I can live with that. I successfully restored contacts from Google, and most
apps reappeared; though some would no longer function and none had their passwords. Fortunately, I had recorded those in a Rolodex file.
One of my email accounts just would not “take” no matter what. Hours and hours of trying the Verizon/AOL third-party special password approach did not work, either. I paid AOL for a month of tech support, exhausting myself talking to them, but they just repeated what I had done. They said the problem was with Samsung. And Samsung concluded that the problem was with AOL.
Ultimately, after multiple emails and contact with higher-level people at AOL, I was given the secret of how to generate a special password on my laptop and transfer it into the account setup on the phone. Ta da! AOL tech support definitely needs a refresher course in email troubleshooting.
I was surprised at my level of anxiety when I was phone-less, both during the repair period and through data restoration. After all, there was no divorce or death involved.
Put in perspective, the phone should have been like any other appliance, a matter of inconvenience and then repair. But in our lives today the smartphone has become much more, especially if it is unavailable for a matter of weeks. For me, its loss invoked deep reactions I had not imagined.
But there may be an upside, after all. I’ve now set a new personal goal of relying on my smartphone far less for routine needs. I can now wait until I get home to use my laptop to look up an actor or send an email. I am already texting less, which means I am not looking at the phone at restaurants or when I am a passenger in a car. I’ve given myself permission to turn off the ringer and notifications when I am with other people. I’m now a more focused and interesting conversationalist.
Put differently, I’m free. My cellphone no longer controls my life. I keep it where it belongs: in my pocket for an emergency, or to listen to audiobooks when bicycling (now with a more secure rear shirt pocket).
Psychologists suggest that once a traumatic event occurs, you may be more susceptible to an acute emotional response from a similar event, a kind of PTSD. I know two things now, though: First, I can indeed survive without my smartphone for three weeks (OK, there will be considerable discomfort, but I can survive). Second, and more important, I know that if something happens to my smartphone again, I will not find it as traumatic because I will not be as dependent on it for my daily interactions and needs. May you be so blessed.
James Talens is a (mostly) retired telecom attorney who lives seasonally in Boynton Beach.
