Nothing has changed our daily lives, in all my 68 years on this planet, so much as the smartphone.
I learned that the hard way when I lost my phone last weekend.
First came the fear. All my passwords are there. My money is accessible there. I must cancel the service, but I don’t have a phone to do it with.
My wife and I drove home in a panic. She tried calling my carrier as we drove, but the proof of identity I needed to start the process was on my desktop. (Imagine if I didn’t have a desktop.)
Fortunately, we weren’t far from home. (What if we were?) On arrival I closed out the phone service quickly. I even ordered a new phone, coming in 5 days, at nominal cost. That phone will have a SIM card to get me most of my apps, thanks to the cloud.
Then I did another stupid thing. As stupid as losing the phone.
I decided, for no good reason, to fix a small problem in my browser. All my “favicons,” those tiny icons identifying sites you visit regularly, had disappeared from my browser. I did what most sites suggest. I restored the browser’s defaults. In the process, I deleted my Google profile. I knocked myself off Google. (There’s a better way, as David Gewirtz has written.)
That’s not a problem, I thought. I have my Google password. But what’s this? Two-factor authentication! And it’s all dependent on my phone. Which I don’t have and won’t have for another few days.
Without email, you don’t exist. Without email, I can’t even access my work system’s two factor authentication, which uses a phone call or a passcode (sent via email) to let me in.
I’m lucky. I’m married. My partner has a lot of patience with my ongoing stupidity. The only way to get back my Google access, to prove my identity, is to have someone vouch for me via their email account. My wife vouched for me. (That’s what a half-century of living together buys you.)
But Google puts a 24 hour delay on recognizing her callback, to make sure I’ve not been kidnapped. Meanwhile, the only way to get into the work server is for me to borrow her computer and send my work in via her email. This put a strain on my boss, who had to find a way to get my work coded and processed through WordPress while doing a host of other things necessary to keep the business operating. (Sorry, boss.)
It's possible we’re turning the corner here. She should get my access back soon. I should be back on email soon. I should get a new phone soon.
But the lesson remains. We’re completely dependent on our smartphones. I wrote a decade ago that they’re not phones, they’re mobile Internet clients. But they’re a whole lot more. They’re our identity. They’re where we live. They’re our money, our wallet, our lives. Losing your phone is a major life disaster.
Not just in America. I’ll bet there are Indians and Africans and even Ukranians who will read this with a knowing smile. Our global society has been transformed.
