One of the things we always worry about now that we meander minimally is what happens when stuff breaks. Specifically, our phones and computers. Well, here’s the good news: we have weathered the storm, and Laurel has a new phone.
We’ve written about the tech we own, which isn’t much (now even less than a year ago). Occasionally we flirt with buying some fancy new thing like wireless headphones, but we’ll probably only get those after all the rest of you have moved on to the thing after that. We mentioned in that post that our phones are pretty old. They are, as it happens Samsung S8s, which a relative who knows about these things recommended to us. Long, long ago. Apparently, in something like 2017. In any case, a mere six years later – time flies! – we are ready to replace them. Well, we aren’t really – we’d happily keep these, but Laurel is always doing three things at once, and drops her phone all the time. One of the recent droppings seems to have damaged the motherboard. Or the screen, or something.
In any case, there’s now a brilliant white horizontal line along the bottom of the phone. Which is cool, if battery-draining, and she was happy to ignore it. But then the phone started flickering and now the screen is dark more often than not. So she realised she’d have to get a new one (sigh). We are not tech people. Indeed, it took about a week and a half of flickering for Laurel to reach this decision. Because we like futility, we even inquired in a mall kiosk about getting the phone fixed (€125 if it was the motherboard; €65 for the screen). Nope; so we set ourselves to the task of buying a new one.
After many lengthy and satisfying conversations with our carrier, T-Mobile (which has the best international plan we’ve found), we determined that we could just buy unlocked telephones and plunk our sim cards into them. Very likely you knew that already. We were fairly certain too, but it never hurts to check. The people on the phone spent most of their energy trying to convince us to go to the T-Mobile store (there isn’t one in Dublin). We are perfectly happy with T-Mobile as a carrier, and we want to keep our US phone numbers. As we told them.
So then we went to a Curry’s. This seems to be a (very) budget electronics store. There was limited help available, and the phones were all locked down so we couldn’t even hold one before we bought it. Luckily, we are savvy and decisive so the whole thing only took us an hour or so, and we spent most of that trying to persuade the listless employees to wait on us.
We bought a Samsung Galaxy A14, which is not especially fancy, but which has a headphone jack and thrives, we have it on reliable authority, on being dropped. (That’s not actually true – apparently none of them like this? Entrepreneurial opportunity here…) And then, miracle of miracles, we took the new phone home, switched out the sim card, and – but for the maddening frustration of having to sign into everything all over again and receiving dozens of notifications about forgotten passwords – the new phone is all set up. Even this process, though, wasn’t so bad; Laurel only has about ten apps on her phone.
So: we are now confident that we can handle any further tech malfunctions on our journey. Possibly even if they happen in another language. The hardest part of the whole business was finding a phone case that perfectly captures Laurel’s complex and sparkly personality (see first image)…
