I keep my tech far too long. I have *no* idea how old my desktop computer is. One of my laptops is over twenty years old. I bought a new phone last year because my old ones were running out of memory/storage. Even though I install only minimal apps on them, and clear off pictures as fast as I can email them to myself, I *had* to get something with more room. So, I moved my SIM chip, and mobile phone number, to a new phone with more memory, and a higher resolution camera.
But, of course, I didn't get rid of the old phones. I can still use them for email, and dictating, and my calendar (an absolute necessity, these days), and WhatsApp, and tracking walking on Google Fit. The old phones don't have phones numbers or SIM chips, but using them for those things saves battery on the new phone.
And you may have noticed I said "phones." Plural. When we first got a cell phone (and I was *very* late to the game on that) we immediately realized that we had to get *two* phones, because the only time we *used* the phones (back then), was to call each other. So, one of the old phones is Gloria's phone.
Which has now died. For the last few weeks it has been difficult trying to charge it, and yesterday it just absolutely refused. I've tried it with the various chargers that I have, and it's just dead. (Cruelly but appropriately?) *My* old phone still seems to be working, so I'll carry on using it for email, etc, etc.
I find that I'm having trouble with the idea of throwing Gloria's phone away ...
I have realized, that I have a way, workable but slightly inconvenient, to resurrect, and even keep using, Gloria's old phone. Since we always had two phones, and mostly they were the same phone, I can switch the batteries on the phone, and use my phone, to charge the battery for Gloria's phone. Then I can put the phone the battery back in Gloria's phone and actually use the phone. As I say, it's inconvenient, and slightly kludgy, but it's possible. I probably won't actually *use* Gloria's phone, but I can get it back into working order, and probably pursue some way of doing a factory reset on it, so that I can safely send it out for recycling.
Which, along with the dream about the luggable computers, got me thinking about the fact that I use computers and devices far too long. I actually don't know how old these phones are. I know that they are more than six years old at this point. Actually, over the roughly thirty-five years that we had cell phones, Gloria and I only had four sets of phones. Our first was a pair of Nokias, so that's how far back this started. Our second set of phones were a couple of flip phones. And in that generation, Gloria had a pink flip phone, so we actually didn't have quite the same model. The next generation were Samsung cell phones, with slide out keyboards. (The girls were demanding that we start texting.) And then there were these current Samsung Galaxies, once again the same model, and so able to interchange the batteries. Last year these phones got to the point where, while they still worked, I ran out of space and memory on the phones, and so had to go and buy something more updated, with larger storage and memory. (Oh, I probably should throw in there that, as a prize at some vendor seminar or trade show, I did actually have a Windows phone for a time. I never got an account for it as a phone, but I used it for quite a while as a kind of a mini tablet, and it had the best camera of the phones that we had at that point.)
What did I want to say about phones, in this regard? Probably that I use them in weird ways. I keep them far too long. The Windows phone still worked when I had to get rid of it, but the Windows cell phone operating system, which it ran on, couldn't be updated for that particular model (a later Nokia, as well) of phone. That meant that the apps on the phone couldn't be updated, either. And, eventually, all of the apps stopped working, as everyone was switching to https, and none of the apps on the phone would connect in that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment