Epic Electronic Fail

Tuesday was a BAD day!

It started out with me discovering that I had neglected to pack my work laptop into the roller bag on Monday night before I left the office, though I had all my files.  Of course, the discovery was made Tuesday morning, an hour before a meeting at an alternate work site - 45 minutes away from my desk.  Crapith! I immediately bolted out the door, dashed out to the truck to make the trip to recover the laptop.  I figured I would call my colleague, let him know what happened and that we would just push the meeting back a bit. 

This is where things started to head downhill.

Oh, I was aware the round trip would take longer due to rush hour traffic.  I knew there is no fast and easy route to take between the two locations.  What I didn't know was this would be the exact moment my cell phone decided to die.

As in completely dead. 

No, not just out of power and after a few minutes on the charger, would spring back to life.  I mean completely, totally, forever dead. 

I have a love/hate relationship with my cell phone to begin with - this was pushing me over the edge.  The last time DH & I replaced our cell phones, upgrading to smart phones, I spent an hour each month, for the next FIVE months, on the phone with AT&T disputing the bill.  

Knowing I was about to face an evening of cell phone shopping was giving me some anxiety.  In the meantime - I was cut off from communicating in a timely fashion.  Add to that, I was definitely going to inconvenience a colleague, who was carving time out of his schedule to help me with my project, outside of his normal duties. And traffic, as expected, was horrendous. 

I eventually retrieved my laptop - it was just sitting there on my desk mocking me.  I was able to conquer the SharePoint project - thanks to my colleague.  And the husband was ready to head out for cell phone shopping the minute I pulled into the driveway.

You would think that would be the end of the electronic drama, wouldn't you?  You'd be wrong.  There was on final dig.  NONE, not a single one of my contacts could be retrieved from the dead phone.  The techs at both Best Buy & AT&T, trying everything, could not recover the phone numbers stored in my old, very dead phone.  

Moral of my Epic Electronic Fail:

Make sure you have a back-up, up-to-date paper copy (yes, old school but effective!) of all your contact phone numbers.  

And while your doing that - make sure you email all your phone photos to yourself, and store them on your personal computer or back up hard drive, almost as soon as you take them.  The techs couldn't recover my pictures either.

Epilogue: I am now the owner of a BLUE Galaxy S5 - we're slowly getting to know each other.