Its ridiculous how dependent I have become on my phone. I mean, I always have been dependent on my phone no matter what, since I had my first cell phone. But since I got the smart phone, its been just plain ridiculous. Over the past few weeks, I have personalized it a lot! Unique ringtones, unique text notifications, email notifications, Whats app settings, gtalk settings, ringtone maker, kindle books, etc etc etc. And I need them all! Anything and everything that matters and that is important to me (or has been important over the past few weeks) are all stored in various apps.
HTC evo 3D, however, is fairly notorious for breaking down every now and then. When I had gone to the store to select my new smart phone, 5 our of the 6 people in line (the 6th person being me), had all brought their HTC evo phones because of some malfunction of the other. I wasn't being particularly smart when I zeroed in on this smart phone!
So, my phone gave me a whole bunch of trouble today evening. For no apparent reason, my phone would just freeze and reset and restart. Over and over and over again. It was practically useless. Can't make calls, send texts, check email, gtalk, nothing. Because the stupid phone kept restarting and suddenly had a mind of its own and went on strike.
After a frustrating hour, trying to figure out what went wrong, I finally opened my laptop to google out a solution. Turns out, I am not the only one with this problem. And everybody else who has had this issue, has had to reset the phone to factory settings. Wipe out everything. Reset fresh. Totally from scratch.
Damn.
I did what I had to do. I had to restore factory settings on my phone. When I turned it on again, it was like being with a stranger. Not my phone anymore. I didnt even recognize it. The wallpaper was all different, the weather read the temperature in Fahrenheit instead of my usual Celsius scale, all my favourite apps gone, ringtone set to boring old standard ringtone. Ugh. I felt like everything had changed.
I did lose a lot of stuff. All text messages were gone. All photos I got through my text messages were gone. All my apps gone. All my contacts gone. Everything erased.
Or so I thought!
SOME, not all, remained saved in my memory card (which apparently did not get reset). So all the photos I had taken with my phone camera were still there. When I re-downloaded kindle, it automatically took me to the page in the book where I had stopped. When I downloaded my ringtone app, it came with all the unique ringtones I had created. But thats the extent of it. That is all I managed to recover.
Life can be like a smart phone sometimes. It seems to malfunction. You try to fix it, but the problems don't go away. Life freezes, unfreezes, shuts down and opens up in a manner designed to frustrate/depress/annoy the crap out of you. What do you do then?
Wouldn't it be awesome if life came with a "reset to factory settings" option? Not where everything is erased. Of course not. More like, my not-so-smart phone's reset option. Where some stuff is erased but a lot of important stuff from the past is still with you.
I wish I knew where this reset button for life existed.
But life doesn't have to be more complicated than a simple reset button. Its all upto us, ain't it? What we want to keep and what we want to leave behind, what we want to change, what we want to customize in our lives, is all up to us. I think every now and then, when we see our systems slowing down, its probably useful to sort through all the material on our hard disks and trash all the negatives and keep the positives.
We all depend on ourselves to take care of things in our own lives. Nobody is going to do it for us. Life is like your smart phone or your laptop/desktop, where you have stored everything that matters to you.
I know this sounds corny, but, don't we owe it to ourselves to clean up the negatives and back-up the positives so if the system should ever crash, we never lose what makes us happy?
P.S.: I just had to write this post. Its been soooooo long since I did an analogy post!
HTC evo 3D, however, is fairly notorious for breaking down every now and then. When I had gone to the store to select my new smart phone, 5 our of the 6 people in line (the 6th person being me), had all brought their HTC evo phones because of some malfunction of the other. I wasn't being particularly smart when I zeroed in on this smart phone!
So, my phone gave me a whole bunch of trouble today evening. For no apparent reason, my phone would just freeze and reset and restart. Over and over and over again. It was practically useless. Can't make calls, send texts, check email, gtalk, nothing. Because the stupid phone kept restarting and suddenly had a mind of its own and went on strike.
After a frustrating hour, trying to figure out what went wrong, I finally opened my laptop to google out a solution. Turns out, I am not the only one with this problem. And everybody else who has had this issue, has had to reset the phone to factory settings. Wipe out everything. Reset fresh. Totally from scratch.
Damn.
I did what I had to do. I had to restore factory settings on my phone. When I turned it on again, it was like being with a stranger. Not my phone anymore. I didnt even recognize it. The wallpaper was all different, the weather read the temperature in Fahrenheit instead of my usual Celsius scale, all my favourite apps gone, ringtone set to boring old standard ringtone. Ugh. I felt like everything had changed.
I did lose a lot of stuff. All text messages were gone. All photos I got through my text messages were gone. All my apps gone. All my contacts gone. Everything erased.
Or so I thought!
SOME, not all, remained saved in my memory card (which apparently did not get reset). So all the photos I had taken with my phone camera were still there. When I re-downloaded kindle, it automatically took me to the page in the book where I had stopped. When I downloaded my ringtone app, it came with all the unique ringtones I had created. But thats the extent of it. That is all I managed to recover.
Life can be like a smart phone sometimes. It seems to malfunction. You try to fix it, but the problems don't go away. Life freezes, unfreezes, shuts down and opens up in a manner designed to frustrate/depress/annoy the crap out of you. What do you do then?
Wouldn't it be awesome if life came with a "reset to factory settings" option? Not where everything is erased. Of course not. More like, my not-so-smart phone's reset option. Where some stuff is erased but a lot of important stuff from the past is still with you.
I wish I knew where this reset button for life existed.
But life doesn't have to be more complicated than a simple reset button. Its all upto us, ain't it? What we want to keep and what we want to leave behind, what we want to change, what we want to customize in our lives, is all up to us. I think every now and then, when we see our systems slowing down, its probably useful to sort through all the material on our hard disks and trash all the negatives and keep the positives.
We all depend on ourselves to take care of things in our own lives. Nobody is going to do it for us. Life is like your smart phone or your laptop/desktop, where you have stored everything that matters to you.
I know this sounds corny, but, don't we owe it to ourselves to clean up the negatives and back-up the positives so if the system should ever crash, we never lose what makes us happy?
P.S.: I just had to write this post. Its been soooooo long since I did an analogy post!
2 comments:
OMG!! (Just struck me how that could also read, Oh! Macho Girl! :P).. Absolutely fantastic post.. love the analogy!! I so wish we had a reset button too.. so that some bottled up feelings could go away, and we could make a fresh start.. (only to get to that stage again right? Sigh.. that's life!).. The only thing that we can do, is to be grateful for the positives and being happy, no matter what.. We owe it to life :)
P.S. Word verification - preast.. priest preaching? :P
Oh btw, this happens to my phone tons of times! :D
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