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Hating Technology in the Time of Coronavirus
Two seniors walk into a phone store to set up a new phone. If you are waiting for the punchline, there won’t be one. The stores are still closed, and even if they were open, the risk would be too great. No human to help via phone either, so we are on our own. It’s just YouTube videos and advice from friends to get this accomplished.
My iPhone 8 expired, so I ordered a new one online, with the help of my friend Gretchen from AT&T, with whom I exchanged typed messages. Although I still don’t understand how much this phone cost me, I succeeded in ordering one, and it arrived a few days later. So far so good? Well, not really because I had never set up a phone by myself before. Gretchen promised it would be simple and sent me a 51 second cartoon explaining “everything.” Right.
I called my most tech-savvy friend who emailed me a link to a really good how-to video. After figuring out how to turn on the new phone, it was pretty amazing. My old phone sat next to my new one and actually transferred all of my apps and photos and contacts in less than an hour. But no way was I close to being done. Somewhere in the Internet directions I was told to remove the SIM card from the old phone…
