Wrong Number
A new smartphone made its way into our house, and much of the weekend was spent getting it up and running…there’s the activation with a carrier, removing the bloatware apps, installing apps you want, moving contacts over, personalizing settings…it quickly becomes more time consuming than you might think.
That’s in large part because whenever you are trying to make a change, to delete something, to alter the device in even the most basic way, you are asked at least once and usually twice if you are sure you want to do that. It’s designed to make sure you don’t act hastily and make a mistake. Sure enough, at one point in the process I simply asked it to restore the whole device to factory defaults so I could start over. The device asked me multiple times if I was really, really sure I wanted to do that.
All is now well, the device works fine and it properly personalized. But it was no easy feat.
I thought of that when I thought again of the news report that some 27 different phones used by members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating the president were accidentally wiped clean. As in…just as folks were curious to see what texts and data might be in the phones, they mysteriously turned up without data. All just a clumsy accident or coincidence.
Gosh, I forgot my passcode and entered the wrong one too many times, so it blanked out my phone. Gee, I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden all my data was missing. Oops.
I find it hard to believe that happened, that many times, to that many people…people we thought of as the cream of the crop, a crack staff of hand-picked investigators. As has been noted, by more than a few, if you can’t be trusted to use a smartphone, then maybe you shouldn’t be investigating the president or his campaign.
Maybe they should have called tech support for help. Then again, if my weekend experience of more than two hours on the phone with tech support is any guide…that wouldn’t have helped. But put me down as more than a little suspicious about all this.
