Bergen is a beautiful city, which I hope to visit again one day. Unfortunately, it will remain in my memory as the place where my phone crashed and I lost photos, videos and Apps.
I have a confession to make. Not only do I have a Windows phone, but I also love it. I realise it has disadvantages. I cannot access some of the Apps available to other phones, so I miss out on the Snapchats my family send to each other. But I can overlook that. I am comfortable with my phone. I know how to use it and, sometimes it even surprises me with an extra bit of functionality I hadn’t realised was there. My relationship with my Windows phone is a bit like that with my children. I know they all have shortcomings, but I love them regardless.
I am very rarely disappointed with my phone but in Bergen I got furious with it, threatening to replace it. In retrospect, it was probably my fault for not performing a hard reset when I upgraded to Windows 10. In my defence, that wasn’t clear in the instructions. Move forward several months, in a foreign country with no phone access and suddenly I can no longer contact anyone on WhatsApp as apparently there is no storage left on my phone. Why didn’t I have an SD card, you ask. I did, I say. However, although I made sure everything new was stored on the SD card and everything I could move to it was moved, I still ran out of storage.
Thankfully, I had also brought my Surface Pro with me, so off to Google I went. Most of the websites I found recommended performing a hard reset. Half of them suggested taking the SD card out first, which is exactly what I did. The hard reset fixed the storage issue, but the phone no longer recognised the SD card, even after performing another hard reset with the SD card in place. This was a problem as I had all my photos, videos and apps, including WhatsApp – my main communication source for this trip – on the SD card. All of it was lost.
What about OneDrive you ask? Some of my photos and videos were uploaded, but then, being slightly suspicious of saving things in the cloud, I changed the settings.
I searched everywhere for some sort of help which I didn’t have to pay for. Eventually I tweeted Microsoft help and they suggested I try the SD card in a different phone to see if it was still working. Unfortunately, none of my fellow travellers could help. I tried downloading WhatsApp and Viber again, but they require phone connections for SMS codes, so it is out of the question until I return to Australia and have my phone again.
Consequently, here I am on a train to Berlin, having managed to travel from Bergen to Amsterdam and stay there a few days, still alive, still well and still enjoying my trip despite the loss of communication capability. Instead of texting my fellow travellers with my whereabouts, in the mornings we arrange a time and place to meet for dinner. I still have Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Twitter – what more do I need?
And, despite my threats to find a replacement, I’m going to keep my Windows phone. After all, you can’t exchange your children if they disappoint you, can you?
