I know that it has a particular meaning in football games, but that isn’t quite what I have in mind here. My friends and colleagues from the worlds of nursing and medicine will have a different meaning in mind – sudden cardiac death caused by ventricular fibrillation precipitated by mishaps in the arterial or electrical systems of the heart. Think of sudden Left Main coronary artery occlusion, or perhaps Brugada or Long-QT syndromes. But that’s not it either.
I’m thinking about the ways in which various kinds of systems fail. Mechanical systems most often fail bit by bit. You can see or hear mechanical failure coming. Think of a car wheel bearing failing. It doesn’t happen all at once. No, there is an annoying noise that becomes louder as time passes as the metal of the bearings and their housing grinds away. Something similar happens with computer hard drives; you start seeing various kinds of disk errors and computer stuttering before a hard drive fails. That’s how it is with mechanical, and often biological, systems. They sputter to their demise – heart failure, liver failure, cerebrovascular disease and chronic kidney disease are often like that.
It isn’t that way for electronic systems. Electronic systems typically fail suddenly, catastrophically, without warning. My iPhone 8 Plus is a recent case in point. Yesterday, it was serving my communication and information needs as it has for the last four years or so. I don’t typically upgrade phones just because newer and more capable models come out. I typically use them until they experience sudden death. “Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do or do without.” one of my programming peers from yesteryear used to say. She said that it was a saying of the people during WW 1. For me, it is partly frugality and partly inertia. I hate changing things that work.
So, my reliable, workhorse phone suddenly died last night. It was so old that I thought perhaps its battery had failed. Today, I took it to a nearby phone repair shop, and the diagnosis was “sudden death.” A battery replacement showed that there was no life left in its svelte rectangular body – CPR to no avail, as it were.
This evening, Susan has gone to the online AT&T store and ordered a new phone for me. I consider the entire phone replacement exercise an inconvenience, and little more. I have all my email messages on my desktop and in the Goggle cloud. All of my iPhone photos are copied daily to our personal 4TB cloud. Mostly, I need to download the apps that I use often – FB, LinkedIn, the Weather Channel, and a dozen others. What a pain in the ass.
At least my Forrester is still young enough that I don’t have to worry about replacing its wheel bearings.
Well, bah humbug! How very unholiday like of that phone to take leave in the midst of the year’s biggest holiday! Susan to the rescue!
We face a similar need but not due to “sudden death” but to obsolescence. 4G will no longer work. Hmmmmm. My phone works fine now, but I have been warned of its impending death. Death with dignity? Not hardly! I’m fighting it. Trying to find a way out of this! For me, learning a new piece of technology is painful! And it seems I have several now to learn. Yesterday, on Christmas, I got a gadget called a ROKU stick that I can talk to for changing channels and locating TV offerings. OK. And a little thing that sort of looks like an alarm clock, but it apparently does all kinds of wonderous things and it will sit at my bedside. I can ask it to get the weather so I can decide if I want to get up or go back to sleep. I can ask it to call people, set reminders, give me my daily calendar and probably fix my breakfast! Oh My! I am in for a rough hill climb to start 2022. But, with trepidation, I will go boldly (or perhaps not exactly) into the new frontiers. Onward………reluctantly!!!!
Upgrading the phone should be almost painless – especially if your old phone is still alive. You should be able to transfer everything from your old phone to your new one. The Roku streaming device takes a little getting used to, but it doesn’t have a steep learning curve. The voice activated device sounds like a “dot” or an “Alexa” type thing. We don’t have one, and I don’t even want one unless it’s going to make my morning coffee and bring to me in bed. 🙂
Two Dixie cups and a string.
😜
That would be cheaper and more reliable. 🙂