Panic in the morning: I got up (as I usually do), made coffee (as I usually do), and then unplugged my phone from its overnight charge to check for any emails, texts, or whatever (as I usually do). The phone was dead - wouldn't start up, just a black screen. I plugged the phone back into its charger to make sure it had power, and the screen still remained black. Nothing. The phone was dead.
I went on line for advise on what to do, but the internet was not very helpful, just instructions on "how to turn on your iPhone." If that didn't work, they said to get in touch with Apple Support, but how do you do that if the phone's not working?
Old men and technology - it's been drummed into our heads that we can't figure this stuff out, and the snarky "user error" claims just reinforces that anxiety.
The dead phone made me realize how dependent I've become on that slab of tech. How do I reach out to the world? Why take my routine walk if my phone isn't recording and tracking my miles? What's the weather going to be like? I resolved that the first thing I had to do today was go to the Verizon store to buy a new phone.
But just by dumb luck, I plugged the phone back in one more time and pushed the cord extra hard into the charger slot, and a dim "battery charging" icon appeared. It was all the way down to "no charge," but I gave it some time and it finally did recharge. Crisis averted.
With my phone and its pedometer app now working, I took my 5-mile walk today, the 52nd consecutive every-other-day walk since Big Ears. For those of you keeping score at home, my phone shows that I've walked a total of 333 miles, or the straight-line distance from here to Memphis, Tennessee. Along the way, I also dropped 25 pounds (my phone is also connected to my blue-tooth enabled bathroom scale).
Every revised forecast for Hurricane Beryl on the phone's weather app has it tracking more and more to the north-northeast and further from Georgia. At this point, Detroit is more in line with the storm than Atlanta.
Last week, I finally finished playing Horizon: Forbidden West and last night I finished the Burning Shores DLC. According to Steam, I've played 293.6 hours, the 7th most of any game (and the most hours of any single play-through).
Panic in the afternoon: after writing the paragraph above, I checked my Epic Game Launcher to see how my 293.6 hours compared to the games I own not on Steam, but on the Epic app. But on logging in, all of my games were gone. My Library was empty. Where did all my purchases go?
Again, the web wasn't helpful. On-line advise was to check Settings and make sure "Hide My Library" wasn't checked (it wasn't), and after that, restart everything (done, to no success). Finally, it said that maybe I had refunded the games or the games were time-limited releases and other unhelpful, asshole suggestions.
Old men and technology, Chapter Two: Can the old boomer recover his Epic game purchases?
I remembered that I had a backup copy of the Epic Game Launcher on my laptop computer (I was on my gaming computer). I opened it up on the laptop, and all my old games were still there. Whew. I checked all the settings and log-in information carefully, and saw that although the User name and password were the same on both versions of the launcher, they were linked to different email addresses (I've got a few). I switched the email address on the empty version to the one on my laptop and, voila!, the games reappeared. The old man found his purchases!
It's Sunday. I'm not going to do any more technology tasks, for fun or for profit, until tomorrow, as my track record today seems cursed.
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