My phone’s battery seems to have died today. I’m not sure if it’s completely dead yet or if I’ve got a chance of resurrecting it but I’m doing my best to save it somehow… but it basically made me realise how important phones are these days.
I’ve been depending on it a whole lot. My calendar is on it, my notes, photos, Authenticator-Apps, etc. I won’t be able to make any payments unless I use PayPal, which is gonna be a pain in the butt… the worst part probably is that I don’t have a notebook here with all the phone number because it was okay for it to be on the phone… where I’d need it… but now that it’s dead, I’ll have to figure out how to contact my parents. I may call my mother’s workplace to find out about our landline since they changed it a while ago and since I still have the old number memorized. I may have to borrow Ms Magi’s phone for that just to let them know that I’m okay and stuff even if I won’t be able to call them for a while… at the same time, however, that’s only a temporary solution which is why I’ll have to look for a new phone… which is a pain in the arse as well.
My phone was a Samsung Galaxy S6, so… as for phones,… that’s one of the cheapest right now since the phone’s already six years old. We got it during a Christmas sale thingy for free when my parents bought their phones and it was great while it lasted but I’ve noticed that the battery was recharging very slowly as of late and that it would get drained really fast even if I was hardly using it. At the same time, I don’t know if it was just the age of it and the battery eventually dying or if I could have done something differently. Changing out the battery/repairing it is probably gonna cost around 50€ while buying a new one will cost around 160-200€ – and some of the exchange services that I found online in a quick Google search didn’t look too promising based on reviews… I mean, they had a lot of one-star reviews which is bad… meanwhile, others had a lot of great reviews but you can’t really trust those, I guess. I mean, you can easily make an account somewhere and write a good review, right? Scams like that happen all the time. And since my phone has had other issues as well, I may as well buy a new one, once I’ve got some money to spare.
Uhm,… and then there’s also the issue with all the Two-Factor-Authentification-Stuff. I had 2FA-Apps for my Online-Banking-Account, as well as my Steam, Google and Microsoft accounts, so I don’t exactly know if I can just use a different device to install those and log in and then let them use my e-mail for authentification…? I’m not sure how all of that works.
In the meantime, I’ll have to avoid online banking since I’ll need the push-authentication via the app that I had installed… I’ll have to check for bus stops, etc. on the PC and write the bus connections down before I leave the house, which is gonna be annoying if I end up forgetting about it. At the same time, I’ll have to make extra sure that I don’t forget my keys when I leave the apartment. I mean, I already check five or six times if I have them before I leave the house but if I were to forget them now inside and if my flatmate wasn’t here, I’d not only be locked out but I’d also have no way of passing time in the hallway or to contact the dorm-people, which is somewhat tricky. And again, not being able to contact my parents, my grandparents, and friends is tricky. Luckily, Ms Magi started using Discord, so I may be able to use that, but it’s annoying, to say the least, that I won’t have access to my chat history on the phone for a while.
Anyways, I wanted to make this post because I was never really aware of how much I depend on my phone or the internet or my PC. My PC is quite important already since university, streaming, blogging and all of that is only possible through this. The same goes for the internet. If the internet were to go out now, I’d have to use someone else’s phone to contact the people responsible for the dorm’s internet and then I’d just have to wait for ages… Meanwhile, I would be able to still blog if my phone was working due to mobile internet and stuff… Tricky tricky! And with university happening from home nowadays and with me being glued to the computer for most of the day, I wouldn’t know what to do if my computer were to stop working. I essentially wouldn’t be able to do anything really, which is more than a bummer… I’d still have my laptop but all the documents from my classes are on the PC, so I guess I should back those up onto the laptop or onto a USB stick just to make sure.
So, uh, that’s it really for the post. I hope my phone magically works again tomorrow morning. Up until earlier, the phone was displaying a small red light showing that “the battery is low” but it wouldn’t start up. Now it’s just not starting up and has no red light, so the battery is properly drained. I guess it would safe to plug it in now and see if it charges up a little or if I can at least save my data via the computer. Since it doesn’t charge, right now, though, I may not even get my photos back or the contacts or chat logs or anything really, which is a bit of an issue for me personally…
No need to brood over it now. I’ll get some sleep for now and see if it magically works tomorrow again. Since I want my data, I’ll probably resort to getting repairs done on the battery itself instead of getting a pre-paid phone or phone without a camera etc. so that people can at least call me in emergencies. Will have to see.
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
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