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In Jo's Blog

My phone suddenly stopped working this weekend. I was traveling and being connected was more important than usual. The friend who was picking me up at the train station had to find me. The driver who was getting me from her house to the venue where I was speaking the next morning needed to coordinate. Once I arrived at the venue, which was large and sprawling, I needed to locate my point person.

A young girl was coming to volunteer and her mother was anxious about her travel details. My own daughter was flying from Chicago to London and I wanted to be constantly available. And then there was me, on the road from Pune to Mumbai after my talk with a massive storm brewing and floods in the city and totally out of touch.

DAMN phone!

I took the SIM card out at least five times. Reinserted it. Turned the phone off and on more times than I could count. Siddharth, my tech guru, kept sending me ideas and strategies via email (luckily I had an internet stick and a laptop). Nothing, literally nothing, worked.

The Moto G is known to have several design flaws and I had heard of this kind of thing before. Friends told me that what I was experiencing was common: you had to remove the SIM, dust it down, and reinsert it. It happened to everyone eventually. But when I tried the SIM card trick, nothing happened.

I looked at my “Settings” over and over. Considered Network options. Switched from 3G to 2G. And finally gave up. Betrayed, actually. I mean: I had invested a lot of money in a “smart” phone! Why wasn’t it working? Via email, I sent messages to several trusted tech friends, hoping for a solution. To everyone else, I sent messages explaining why I was out of contact and making complicated arrangements to make my appointments, meet friends and find my drivers in the various cities where I was being picked up.

48 hours later, I returned to Dehradun. When my flight landed, I received a flurry of SMS messages, but when I tried to call my husband, I kept getting the same tired old message: “Caller Out of Range.”

Except that this time, I actually listened to that message. Why, I can’t say. All I know is that at last I heard what the lady was saying: “Due to insufficient balance, your call cannot go through.”

Insufficient balance??? What??? Siddharth had asked me about that right at the beginning and I had assured him I had PLENTY of money. PLENTY. Whadda ya know. I actually had zero.

There is a saying among doctors: “If you hear hoofbeats in Texas, don’t assume zebras.” In other words, never forget the obvious. A stomach-ache the day after Thanksgiving is unlikely to be abdominal cancer. A splitting headache the morning after a night on the town is probably not a brain tumour.

So if you get four hours sleep and wake up the next morning feeling grumpy, do not assume you have clinical depression. If your toddler is totally freaking out at 8 PM, do not think you are a terrible mother. Think about bedtime. And a phone on the blink is more likely to be about an unpaid bill than a software glitch.

Think easy. Think fixable. In life as in technlogy, never ever, ever forget the obvious.

 

 

 

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