Everything is bad – my phone is not working

The message on my phone did not make sense. It said I no longer had a SIM card.

After turning it off, resetting it and turning the airplane mode on and off several times, I handed it over to my wife. She tried some of that and more, and it started back working. But, from what she had seen on the website, my phone may need to be replaced, so we went ahead and ordered a new one.

My phone worked through the next morning – which was Sunday (Jan. 11) – and then it popped up with that message of having no SIM card. Thankfully, my new phone was delivered the next day. Once again, I handed it over to my wife (she is the IT person at our house) and she worked on getting everything transferred over from my old phone to the new, while I took her phone and went to cover Christian comedian Mickey Bell’s talk at Celebrate Recovery.

When I returned home, the phone was in the midst of transferring everything. Since it was getting late, we left my old and new phone alone as the data went from one to the next.

On Tuesday morning, I picked up my new phone and everything seemed good. Just before my wife left to go to work, I tried to place a call to her phone just knowing it would work. Imagine my surprise when I got the message that my new phone did not have a SIM card. 

Long story short, it turned out that we had to remove the SIM card out of the old phone and place it in the new phone. My replacement phone did not come with the necessary object, which was a small little pin needed to push the button and eject the card, to get the job done. Once we were able to complete that task – and when I say we I really mean the nice woman at the cellphone store – my new phone sprang to life and I started receiving all of the text messages that I had been missing since Sunday.

When something like this happens, it seems like our day, or days, are ruined. We depend on our phones so much today. 

It is funny how much we depend on our cellphones. I remember when my wife – girlfriend at the time – bought her first cell phone. The late 1990s model came in a bag, and you might have needed to pull the antennae to get a signal. At the time, I did not see the need to have a cellphone in the car. Usually, we were together and we did not need two. This was also the time when there were more “phones” and not devices where you could play games, watch shows or read your email.

One Sunday night we were at her parents’ house on Lake Sinclair. We left their house for me to return Jill to her college dorm before I returned home. About a mile from her parent’s house, Jill started to not feel well. We turned around and I took her back since we were a good 10 to 15 miles from the college. She decided to stay there, so I brought her bag cellphone back to the house and I jumped into the car to return home.

In order to get home, I had to go down about a 10-mile stretch of road where there is basically nothing until you get back into the Milledgeville city limits. As I was driving down this road when all of a sudden my car started sputtering and slowing down. I pulled the blue 1971 Chevrolet Nova completely off the side of the road. This old vehicle’s gas gauge had recently stopped working, so we kept up with the mileage on a small notepad. Apparently, I had done the math wrong and was completely out of gas.

It was almost 10 p.m. on a Sunday night on a road that hardly had any traffic on it. So I started walking. Eventually, I was able to get a ride from a nice young man who was able to take me to my preacher’s house at the end of the road. The next day, I went into a business and bought my first cellphone.

When my phone messed up the other day, I had to keep going. If something had happened, I would have been able to call 911. But that was it. Some may recall last Wednesday when Verizon had issues. Friends, who did not know about my situation during the previous days, made the statement that I did not know how it felt not to be able to call or text someone.

If they only knew.