I'm in the Phone Booth It's the One Across the Hall. If You Don't Answer I'll Just Ring it Off the Wall.

Well, kids. I'm going to write this big rant post where I cry fat, white people tears about my obnoxious first world problem. Yup, that's right. After three years I decided to upgrade to an iPhone 8. Worst mistake I ever made. I stupidly bought it at Best Buy, and they don't seem to train the people who work there very well. So, the guy who sold me the phone told me he activated it at the store, since I paid him $36 to do just that. Turns out, he didn't activate it, so I had to go to Verizon and pay them another $20 to activate it. I will give Best Buy props for responding to my bad review by refunding money for the other things I bought when I picked up my iPhone.

Of course, the fun didn't stop there. My phone never worked quite right. It kept giving me a black screen, and then it would work just fine. I have no idea why it would sometimes work and sometimes not. It finally got to the point where it was a black screen for several days straight. I stupidly also bought the Applecare insurance, which means you have to go to a specific Apple store, which we don't have in Iowa city, which meant I had to drive to Cedar Rapids after work.

There they were able to restore my iPhone and it worked without the screen turning black for at least a couple of days. Then we went back to the same problem until the screen blacked out the Sunday evening of Thanksgiving weekend and it hasn't worked since.

So, since we're going to Chicago tomorrow, we're going to take it to an Apple store there where they will hopefully give me a new iPhone. I was warned that it might cost me about $100 for a replacement phone. So far my running total is $599 for the iPhone, $136 for the insurance, and possibly another $99 for a replacement iPhone for a two month old phone that has never really worked. My desktop computer cost less than that and it's worked for over nine years. We did get my old iPhone6 back up and running until we can try to get my new phone replaced (hopefully).

This whole mess has made me yearn for the days where I just had a watch, an alarm clock, a Walkman for music and a landline phone instead of a smart phone.

Sorry about the rant. I know that the deal with first world problems is that they're like listening to someone talk about their dreams, no one really cares except the person experiencing them. Sigh.