I wrote this last week when my phone was broken and I was a little bit distraught. I feared if my phone was recovered it would have to be reset losing everything. It was before I took my phone to some experts who believed they could fix my phone. And they did. I also managed to dig out an iPhone 5 with a broken screen and which I last used in 2014. It was so old and incompatible with newer apps that Instagram would only allow squares and it had the old logo. The camera was ok if you wanted to take a picture of a statue in bright light, but not so good with anything living. It also wouldn’t make phones calls and texts, but at least the internet and emails worked (even if I could only half read the screen).

My phone is broken. There is no doubt I am struggling. Now some people (most people) will say I spend too much time on my phone, but for me it is how I connect with the world, it is how I drag myself through the long hard days and it is what I use to capture the happy moments. 

It’s the camera I miss most. Since it stopped working I have gone to grab it on approximately 60064 occasions to take a quick snap of my youngest doing something funny or cute to share with her Dad later on. Images and moments that I will have forgotten by bed time.

The bed time when I will lie in bed next to Little waiting for her to fall asleep. With no phone to entertain me it is likely I will fall asleep before her.

It isn’t helping my anxiety either. While I can get iMessages on my MacBook I don’t know who has tried to call or text me. The last number to call me as my phone died was school. I had to message M’s Dad via twitter (and not even DM because he doesn’t follow me) to let him know.  I have a mild but constant edgy feeling that there might be an emergency and I won’t know. How do people cope without phones?

Theoretically we have a landline. There isn’t a phone plugged into it though as the only calls we got were sales calls. I don’t even know the phone number. At least I know it is there in case of an emergency. Although it would probably be faster to go next door and ask to borrow their phone.

My photo’s are automatically uploaded to Google so they aren’t totally lost, but I haven’t backed my phone up for months and months so other things will be. Like videos. Months worth of videos including some I was planning to upload to YouTube. All my Notes including some important work information are all unobtainable too.

I have Googled the solution obviously and while my phone can quite possibly be made useable again it will need to be restored to the factory settings to do so. Goodbye the last few months of memory prompts. My iPhone screen goes white and show me a black Apple logo, but it’s unable to boot any further. It had the same issue yesterday, but recovered after an hour or two. Today nothing is working. 

I still have hopes that it will recover and check it periodically, because while a new phone is an expense I can’t afford (and if i was going to get one I would have rather have waited for the new iPhones to be released) the bigger loss is what is on the phone. So my message to everyone: back your phones up weekly. And while I am thinking about it I’m off to back my blog up too.

Side note: apparently the issue was an an internal one which can often happen when a phone is bent slightly (or possibly dropped repeatedly and chewed on by a toddler for a year an a half). It needed a new chip and some resoldering and for £75 it was fixed. I have since backed it all up and I am calm again.