16 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {sloane citron} told me that I was “overdue” in remembering my cousin Peter’s birthday on March 3. Huh? It appeared hundreds of times and just kept coming. After an hour of turning off everything I could find, googling it to oblivion, trying this and that, finally something clicked and that darn thing stopped. I felt like my electronics were after me. To whom do I offer contrition? In the midst of this nightmare, I woke up one morning to see the dreaded message: Your credit card has been compromised, please call our fraud department. I have been down this path before, and I took a deep breath since I knew, having not bought a TV at a Best Buy in Detroit, that I would have to get a new card. This is an experience little different from my missing contacts. Having had my card for many years, its imprint was everywhere, stored for my use in the way that these magic machines do. And I knew that I could look forward to dunning letters from businesses informing me that my stored credit card no longer worked. Here’s the point: technology mostly doesn’t work. In our small office, almost every single day there is an issue of some kind, whether hardware, software, cloud storage, apps, copy machine and so on. Since I am amazed that these devices work in the first place, I tend to be understanding when they don’t. And they mostly don’t. After my week of technology disasters, here’s my thinking: Despite their zest to get me into a headless carriage that works only because of highly complicated and fallible technology, I know better. My Waymo will break, my seatbelt will fail, and my demise will be in the hands of, well, nobody. F rom our large office windows, we watch the traffic on El Camino. Sometimes there is a bit of action when a police car stops someone or an ambulance comes whizzing by. Lately, however, the action is of a different kind. Hundreds of Waymo cabs, with no driver in them, troll up and down El Camino like salmon unthinkingly finding their way upstream to spawn. My first thought is of the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers who will lose their livelihoods when Waymo undercuts them. The technology that goes into making them work is impressive, but … My month started innocently enough. I bought a refurbished iPhone 13 Mini to replace my aging iPhone 12 Mini. Because Apple stopped making the minis (which I like because they fit neatly in my front pocket), I thought this would be a good option. The phone I bought, however, had almost no battery life left, so I returned it. Then I found out I could buy an unopened, “factory sealed” iPhone 13 mini, which I promptly did. In transferring my information between these devices, my contacts list became corrupted. Certain names were repeated thousands of times while many of my other contacts simply disappeared. It then synced with my Apple computers to create a bloody mess. I spent about 20 hours trying to deal with this myself, with no success. Over the course of a week, I surgically removed the thousands of repeated names and then carefully fixed what I could. This apparently angered my phone to the point that when I woke up the next day, it had tripled the number of repeated and lost contacts. That resulted in 20,000 contacts, most of them from the same dozen people. I googled the issue over and over, adjusting my question so that I might get a useful response. Nothing. I tried Open AI and despite some lovely prose, it also was unable to provide a solution. I was defeated. I made an appointment at the Apple store in Stanford Shopping Center. Despite her best efforts, the advisor (no more geniuses, I guess) could not resolve the issue, and neither could anyone else at the store. While there, she had me call a special number to get more experienced support. After an hour, the first advanced advisor said that she needed to transfer me to someone even more experienced and I was on hold for a while before I got Jamain. He took control of my laptop (which I had brought) and together he walked me though what to do. It was a compromise at best. I now had my contacts from three years ago, but anything added after that time was gone. But at least it seemed to have stopped the endless duplication of my contacts. I’ve been doing everything I can think of to recapture my missing contacts. Through vigilance, I have most of them back, though I’m sure there are ones that I don’t know are missing and that I won’t realize it until I need to call them. It has been a nightmare. The next day in my office, a “reminder” at the bottom of my computer screen—something I never set up and don’t use— no way, mo
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