A Series of Unfortunate Events
Shaghayegh Hanson
A couple of weeks ago, I had a fall that took me right back to my primary school days and all the tumbles and grazed knees and elbows I would get running around in the playground with my friends. Except, unlike those supple-limbed days, I did not bounce back up and blithely continue on my way. It took a good few minutes. I had just parked my car in a mall parking lot and was walking fast to meet friends for brunch. Instead of looking where I was going, I was absorbed in messages on my phone and tripped over a speed bump in the parking lot—discovering yet another hazard of modern technology. Luckily, no one saw me, or at least no one cared to come to my aid. When I finally got to my feet, I realized my phone, having been the perpetrator of the incident, was also its victim and was smashed in one corner.
By the time I got to brunch, my left elbow was bleeding and swollen, and the entire left side of my body was throbbing with pain. Luckily, one of the friends I was meeting is a doctor, and she quickly procured ice, Band-aids, and antiseptic wipes and fixed me up as best she could (you know who you are—thank you!).
About a week into my injuries, the next, worse thing happened. My dastardly phone locked me out! It was refusing to accept the password I had been using for decades. I could not even reboot it because that too needed a password. Was it broken? Or was it Verizon messing with me? I tried “chatting in real time” (picture rolling eyes) with a Verizon assistant online who told me (typed robotically to me) to try a few different temporary passwords. When I finally got to my last attempt, my Judas phone was apparently well enough to tell me it would reset to factory standards and deprive me of everything dear or critical to me if I got the next password entry wrong. If that happened, how was I ever going to call anyone again (I was long past remembering people’s phone numbers) and how were they going to phone me?! How was I going to find my way to the nearest Verizon store—the only course of action left—without my GPS?! All of a sudden, I realized how much my entire life depended on that fiend of a phone!
Dazed, confused, and utterly panicked, I somehow navigated my way to a Verizon store on the steam of my own brain. Enter “Greg M.” (according to the plastic name tag on his shirt), the hero of this story. This young Verizon employee listened with great patience to my crisis and nonsensical Generation X theories of what technological calamity could have befallen my phone. Calmly and methodically, Greg M. first observed the smashed corner of my phone, noting the break lines were expanding onto the entire screen. Never mentioning that this was not a carrier problem that he was even obliged to help me with, he removed the screen protector, then pressed the buttons on the side of my phone down simultaneously—very hard—for about 40 seconds, which turned the phone off. He turned the phone back on and held his breath with me as I entered my pin for my one remaining attempt. When that worked, I screamed with joy and told him he had saved my life . . . and, sadly, I meant it.
At the time of this writing, the election is almost upon us. I’m hoping the results of it will not be the next, even worse unfortunate event. There will be no ready salve for a bruising like that and no Greg M. to fix the breakage. Regardless, as all unfortunate events teach us, in time, all will be well again.
