A new phone provided challenges

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Oct. 1, 2014. Jack and his phones. He used to drive his staff crazy with his cell phone. Generally, because as he states in the second paragraph of this column, for years it rarely left the glove compartment of his car. But he became a frequent Facetimer, utilizing his phone for face-to-face visits with his grandchildren hundreds of miles away.

Maybe my old phone clued in my new phone.

The old phone, which dated from about 2004, was one of those flip models. And it’s still in mint condition, largely because it spent most of its life turned off and sitting in the console of my car.

I have not been, to put it mildly, a big cell phone user.

Instead, I’ve enjoyed the peace and quiet that comes from being out of touch.

And when Glen Bryant taught me how to drive, he recommended keeping two hands on the wheel. There was nothing about holding a phone up to my ear while negotiating traffic.

But my phone has always been on my wife’s account; so when Connie told me she needed a new phone — a smartphone — for her work as an environmental consultant, that meant I was getting a new phone as well.

Apparently, keeping my old flip phone turned off in the console of my car was no longer an option.

The new phone, I have to admit, is extremely cool. It’s an Apple iPhone 5C, and it was cheap because the iPhone 6 models have just come out.

So for the past several days, I’ve been learning my way around the new technology. Much of it has been intuitive and easy. I’ve been an Apple guy since our first Mac computers back in the early 1990s, and I work on an iMac at home.

Folks at the office who have had smartphones of various models since the dawn of time were amused to watch the boss play with his new toy.

They put up with text messages, watched me mess around with the phone’s camera and generally behaved the way old pros always do when a novice joins the game.

Pretty soon, I was catching up. I sent photos to our daughters, checked my email routinely and was able to access voicemail on our home phone and listen to it on the iPhone.

Then it stopped working.

Maybe my old flip phone had told the iPhone that I would soon be leaving it, turned off, in the console of my car.

It turns out that on the second day I had the phone, I made a huge mistake: I downloaded Apple’s newest phone software.

And the software had a bug in it.

Toward the end of last week, my smartphone suddenly wasn’t quite so smart.

I could make and receive phone calls.

But I couldn’t access the Internet, couldn’t send a one-word message let alone a photograph and couldn’t check my email.

I also could not — and this is critical — access the new software fix that Apple had hurriedly put together to solve exactly the kinds of problems I was facing.

Connectivity had been interrupted, and I needed connectivity to re-establish connectivity. (If that sentence sounds like it makes no sense, then you have understood it correctly.)

As I write this, I’m still not sure how to get the fixed software installed. There’s a good chance that by hooking the iPhone up to my computer at home I’ll be able to download the fixed version.

Then again, the best solution might be to leave it turned off and keep it in the car.