Hope . . . Nothing

My iPhone 6 is less than a year old, I think.  It better be, because it's falling apart.  I was on the road all last week, Shanghai, Suzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong.  In each city I was hopeful.  This is a Shanghai problem. Let me try this when I get to Suzhou.  I’ll restart it and get on the hotel WiFi in Shenzhen.  This must be a PRC problem.  Ahh, the free air of Hong Kong.  I don’t mind paying the roaming if it means my phone will work . . . But it doesn’t. 

 

First my contacts started disappearing.  “Hey, where’s my wife?”  OK, so I updated the OS and rebooted with the highest of expectations.  No contacts and now WeChat and Skype and apps that should work fine with 4G hang, forever.  My phone provides and update:  Someone wrote you and email.  Great.  But app says it isn’t connected. So it’s connected to 4G as little light suggests, but the apps can’t find it.  Restart, reinstall, hope . . . nothing.  The final straw was Sunday morning when I walked out on the to the promenade on the TST harbor and tried to ring a friend.  The microphone wasn’t working.  So it would show that it was ringing, but no voice would materialize.  I could solve this with a headset but that’s not what I have this phone for.  

If it was just one issue, I could research it online and solve it, perhaps.  But this is like the brakes, the exhaust pipe and the steering all went at once.  I am convinced there is something more fundamental askew to have everything simultaneously hit the wall.  I reach for the phone, expecting it to be normal.  Like a dolt I check to see if WeChat can connect, and then Skype.  They can’t.  Maybe if I turn it on and off again, it will be normal. 

I have got to head in to the Apple Store, tomorrow or the next day. I am really not sure when I bought this last year.  I sure hope it’s under warranty.  If it isn’t I’ll be forced to soldier on for a while or consider my alternatives:  The iPhone 7, which insists I get bluetooth earbuds, a new device to charge, or the Samsung Galaxy which seems to catch fire.  I just want it to work.

Almost home now.  Riding along the two-lane Gaobai Lv.  There are no lights on the road, no shoulder beside a long row of tall poplars, which is probably how the street got its name.  On coming cars take turns aggressively and someone is always poised to overtake someone else, in the dark.  It feels like a fall road in the dark, something that Ichabod Crane might ride along, though I don’t think his acephalous adversary would cause much mischief on this road before he was knocked into a ditch.