A Technological Triumph

I bought myself a new phone today.  I did it all by myself.  I did the research, I considered the options, I made the decisions, and nowhere was there a Cuter offering advice. To call this unusual is to understate the obvious.

I start to hyperventilate when I have to consider entering an electronics emporium.  Best Buy makes my palms sweat.  Thinking about talking to the worker bees at the Verizon Store sent my tummy into panic mode.  I have never, ever, ever, entered one of these places without the guiding presence of a child by my side.  Physically holding me upright, or tethered to the other end of my phone, all questions and decisions on laptops and tablets and cell phones and desktops have been considered by the Cuter at my side.

Not so today. Today, emboldened by my three previous, lengthy, thought provoking visits to that same Verizon Store, I took the plunge. I brought Anna Quindlen's Still Life With Bread Crumbs, in hardback, and I settled in on the settee to wait.  I was next.  It took twenty minutes before it was my turn, and I sat, positively sanguine, as the minutes clicked by.  I was a woman on a mission, and nothing was going to spoil my triumph. Besides, I liked having a paper and binding library book on my lap in the inner sanctum of electronic connectivity.  It reminded me of who I am.

My saleswoman approached and greeted me by name, shared hers, and began at the point at which the registration guy left off.  I, prepared and ready, explained in fractured geekish what I wanted.  Her colleague had written it down on the worksheet; 30/30/40/$24.99.  Between us, Chris and I figured out which deal corresponded to which number and suddenly I was shopping for accessories for my new Samsung Galaxy S4.

I'd gone from hanging on by my fingertips to plunging head first into the pool and I'd come up wrapped in a luxurious combination of lilac silicone and purple rubber, perfectly combined to protect my new, graphite grey, protective glass coated phone.  My contacts were transferred along with my apps, moving through Verizon Cloud with seamless elegance. My photos were in the cloud as well; individual pictures were mine to download as I wished.  I was in heaven.

The guts of the phone are similar enough to my old S3 that the learning curve shouldn't be too steep.  I am laughing at myself as I type that; Mr. 8 took hold of the device and quickly figured out where his games had hidden themselves.

I knew enough not to intervene; kids do so much better than I do with all of this stuff.  To them, it's second nature.  To me, it's a chore to be learned. And yet, the 4 has consolidated the steps to set photos as contact pictures, and has added pages, and everything is just a little bit bigger on the screen, and have I said how much I'm loving this?

There's something to be said for climbing the mountain on my own.
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To those of you who were wondering where I was on Friday, this post ran on the other Blogger site I set up in the very beginning of the blog's existence.  For some reason, I clicked on the wrong account when I posted.  Four of you found it...... well done! Hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's Day.  Come back tomorrow for my take on the Wells Report and a civilized work place.  For now, I go to finish the last 35 minutes of on-line traffic school.