This isn’t a sequel, but some of the themes from Reflow are present, though not from the perspective I initially expected. And this isn’t a trilogy, but some of the themes from Austerity are here as well, though again, not quite from the perspective I was expecting. Perspective changes over time—it must.
In revisiting the above posts, I wasn’t sure if they were a suitable primer for what’s to follow—but now, having written what does, they most certainly are. My love of repairing things hasn’t changed at all since Reflow was written, but it would appear my motivations for doing so have. My life circumstance has changed completely since writing Austerity, but it would also appear I’ve come full circle in terms of financial freedom: owing nothing whilst getting nothing is functionally indistinguishable from owing as much as one gets.
As this blog approaches its ten-year anniversary, I am aware of how much my life has changed during that time. What’s written here is only a hint of how time has passed, though—as before—what’s written here has never meant to be the documentation of my life.
These are just stories inspired by me living it.
Anyone who’s ever tried to get something repaired might be familiar with the phrase it’s not worth it when bringing the item to a repair shop. There’s a lot going on in that simple statement, and its meaning will be interpreted differently depending on if you’re standing at or behind the counter. To completely understand the interaction, a crucial and incorrect presumption must be addressed: the intentions of those in this interaction are not aligned. Any perceived alignment comes down to semantics, and that’s the point. But why?
Because of business—of course.
As an aside, if at any time, someone is requesting the conversation not get bogged down in semantics, what they mean is, would you please pay a little less attention to what’s being said. This is either someone who doesn’t understand the meaning of the words they’re using and are upset that you do, or they fully understand the meaning of the words they’re using, but, again, are upset that you do too.
Now, back to the repair shop…
Pretend you dropped your phone and now the screen is chipped and cracked. The display still works, but you’re noticing dark spots and weird lines on it as well. The phone is only a year old and in otherwise great condition, but you know you can’t repair the phone yourself, so you decide to take it to a repair shop so they can repair it. That is, after all, what a repair shop is, correct? A place that repairs things? Incorrect. That place is a business. That place gets money, and, in general, how they get money is by repairing things, but sometimes it’s by not repairing things. This is where the misalignment of intent occurs: your intent is to get your phone repaired; their intent is to get money—your money—and that usually involves repairing your phone.
In the above example, the misalignment of intent goes unnoticed. A screen replacement on a recent phone in otherwise great condition is a quick job: a semi-competent technician can get it done in about an hour and a competent one in about half that time. Shops love quick jobs. Those are the ones that get them the most money: they can preform them over and over again. In this case, your phone is swiftly repaired and is working perfectly, so you happily pay the shop and off you go. Despite it being completely different, your intent is realized along with theirs.
And, not that I want to get bogged down in semantics, but that is the foundational goal of business in general: get money by cultivating a belief within someone else that they have been provided a product or a service in exchange for a payment. Whether or not that payment made any sense or that product or service had actually been provided is irrelevant. Once money changes hands, the job is done. Wash, rinse, and repeat—oh, and speed it up.
If that’s in any way mildly nauseating—that’s business. It’s not for everyone. I know it wasn’t for me. That’s why I quit working at my local phone repair shop less than a month after I started. The trouble was my repair-centric view of the shop: I presumed my job would be to repair phones. Incorrect. My job was to get money. But I didn’t want to get money. I wanted to repair phones.
And that’s been the trouble I’ve faced in every business I’ve ever found myself ever-miserable working at: I rarely get to do what I want. Some would say that’s life. No—that’s business. Whenever I hear someone talking—particularly if their tone suggests restrained fury—about how hard they’ve worked for their business, all I hear is their subconscious awareness of how much of their own life they’ve missed while doing it.
Anyway—back to the pretend repair shop.
Now it’s a few years later. Your phone is still in great condition, but it’s been out of production for a while. Unfortunately, it was accidentally but completely submerged in relatively clean tap water for a few, horrifying seconds. Though it was powered off as soon as it was retrieved, the phone is always trying to turn itself back on due to whatever liquid-fueled chaos is occurring internally. You keep turning the phone off each time it turns on again: what you do know about electronics is they’re not supposed to get wet, especially when there’s power running through them.
This is what happened to me ten years ago with my much-loved iPhone 3GS.
I was cleaning the bathroom and had—for some reason—left my phone in the front pocket of the hoodie I was wearing. When I reached up and across the toilet to get at the shelves above it, the angle was perfect for my phone to slide out of my hoodie and directly into the toilet bowl.
The only positive thing about the entire experience was knowing I’d just finished cleaning the toilet, so I had no reservations about reaching into it to pull my phone out. And even if I hadn’t just finished cleaning the toilet, I would still be reaching into it.
At the repair shop, I let them know what happened. I asked for any water damaged to be repaired, and if that wasn’t possible, for my pictures and any other accessible data to be copied from the phone. My intent was to get my phone repaired, or if it couldn’t be, to get what data could be recovered from it instead. Naïve to the nature of business at the time, I presumed the shop shared in my intent. Incorrect: their intent was to get money—my money—this time by not repairing my phone. After looking at it for an afternoon, they told me it was unstable, they wouldn’t be able to repair it, and they wouldn’t be able to do any data recovery because of its instability.
At the time, I didn’t have an iCloud account as a backup for my data—I was using my MacBook instead. However; any complete backups I’d previously made with the MacBook had been lost due a hard drive malfunction days prior. I hadn’t fixed the MacBook yet, so my PC was acting as an interim replacement—but that meant I wasn’t completely backing up my data the way I used to: it was all on the phone.
The situation was difficult to accept. Over the years, that phone had slowly become an integral part of my life. I was ill-prepared for the emotional reaction I had to its abrupt departure. The intensity of my grief felt as valid as it did irrational.
I knew the phone still worked: they had said it themselves. I asked them—if they could put a price on it—what it would cost to get just the data from the phone.
I was told it wasn’t worth it.
I don’t recall the amount I paid to be told there was no way to repair the phone or recover its data. And I can see now—as I could then—that whatever the amount, it was to account for the time spent by the shop in assessing damage and attempting data recovery, so I was never completely soured by the experience, but I was never completely satisfied by it either.
That evening, despite the phone’s unstable nature, I tried to copy as many pictures as I could from it. With older iPhones, you can plug them into a USB port via the charging cable and browse through any stored pictures and videos directly from the file view of a computer. This is what I was doing, but with the phone restarting throughout the process, it was growing increasingly tiresome to be constantly checking to see what pictures had copied over, retrying what pictures hadn’t copied over, but not retrying too many pictures at once because too many pictures at once caused the phone to restart sooner.
Eventually the phone was restarting constantly. I couldn’t do any more copying. I unplugged it and the screen went blank. There was no response after pressing the power button. Nothing happened when I plugged it into the charger.
At the time, my phone wasn’t the only one experiencing instability, and in a moment of pure confusion, frustration, and rage, I intentionally smashed the phone off the corner of the desk so hard I shattered the screen.
Now it’s broken, I remember thinking as tears burned in my eyes.
Now it’s not worth it.
I regretted my actions immediately, sensing I had committed the ultimate act of betrayal against my electronic companion. My 3GS was gone, along with everything on it. I’d saved maybe a quarter of the hundreds of pictures I knew were still contained within.
Once I calmed down, I sealed the phone in a plastic freezer bag and left it, broken glass and all, for me to come back to with the idea that I would—somehow—try again later.
But later never came.
The remains of the phone vanish into various boxes and totes as I move house, over and over and over again…
Ten years pass.
Everything changes.
Time is change.
It’s later—2023.
For the last year or so, I’ve been watching YouTube videos of iPhone teardowns and restorations in my spare time. I find them relaxing, watching something that’s broken brought back into working condition again. It’s peaceful.
I’m inspired in a genuine way: it’s something I want to learn, something I want to do. A job posting at a local repair shop provides an opportunity to do both. Despite never having opened a mobile phone before in my life, I apply for and get the job.
However—as you know—I don’t stay at the job. I quit, having had my fill of business for the last, and I mean, last time.
But even in my short time there, I know I have learned a lot. I know I still want to repair phones, and I know I still want to keep learning. Perhaps I can try to do both again, this time by figuring out what was previously dismissed to me as unrepairable.
I dig through my electronics totes in storage, and I find my smashed 3GS…
Years of occasional jostling every time I moved house have broken out more chunks of glass from the screen. Parts of the LCD and backlight assembly are visible now. I put clear tape over what’s left of the screen to keep any more glass from dislodging and start disassembling the phone. As I do, I remind myself: though unstably so, it was working even after being soaked.
Was this an issue with one of the many microchips or electronic components on the logic board?
Phones with such fundamental problems usually don’t function at all, and many repair shops will halt work once a board-level issue, as they call it, is suspected. I would need to learn a lot more if that were the case. That sort of diagnostic and recovery experience is honed over months and years, not days and weeks.
I continue nonetheless. Over the next couple of hours, I methodically work through the components, cleaning off signs of corrosion from evaporated water and looking for burn marks from short circuits. I pry off the metal shielding from the logic board, something I assumed the repair shop had done years before as part of their inspection.
But they hadn’t. I can tell. They also hadn’t disturbed the water damage indicator stickers on the screw heads, same for the do not remove sticker over Apple’s sneaky seventh screw.
They didn’t pull the logic board?
As far as I could tell, the display assembly had been taken off, and only some of the logic board screws had been removed, and then, put back—in the incorrect places. There are three different types of screws out of the seven used to secure the logic board in the phone. The shop got two of them mixed up.
Was this the sum total of their investigation and diagnostic work? Did they pop the front off, start disassembly, see the water damage indicators, and then haphazardly throw the phone back together and call the job done?
Now completely removed and bare, I can see signs of light corrosion at various places on the front and back of the logic board. A soft bristle brush, some isopropyl alcohol, a deoxidizing solution, and some gentle, dainty scrubbing makes everything look shiny and new again.
But I also discover a group of components that look quite burned. Situated near the headphone jack, water would have rushed over them first through what’s essentially a giant hole in the top of the phone. According to the board schematics, those components are all to do with the GPS receiver—nothing to do with the core functionally of the phone.
Could that be the extent of the damage?
With all the components clean and dry, everything is assembled back into the phone. I trim the tape flush against the edge of the screen so it will seat correctly and allow the home button to function.
Digging through my old cables, I find an Apple 30-pin dock connector and plug the phone into a low current charger. This an attempt to wake the battery up, so to speak. By offering it just a bit of current, hopefully the battery’s chemistry can be enticed into increasing its internal voltage.
Nothing happens immediately, but these things take time.
I leave the phone to charge overnight.
Back in 2013—there was a problem with replacing my 3GS.
The overwhelming popularity of the iPhone, regardless of the specific model, had kept availability low and prices high for Apple phones. The 5s had recently been introduced and was prohibitively expensive, as well as generally out of stock. The 5c, introduced along side the 5s, was also out of stock, especially due to its reduced price compared to the 5s. The 5, already out of production after not even a year, was still in high demand by those who otherwise couldn’t get a 5s or 5c but wanted the larger form factor offered by the 5. And the 4 and 4s were in high demand by those who did not want the larger form factor offered by the 5.
For everyone else that wanted an iPhone, this had left the 3GS as an attractive option. It wasn’t new enough to warrant the exorbitant prices and limited supplies of the more recent phones, but it wasn’t old enough to be functionally undesirable like the first iPhone or subsequent 3G model. Availability of the 3GS as a second hand or refurbished item was generally high due to the number of others selling their phones or trading them in as part of an upgrade.
Of course, once the situation of this uniquely positioned device was realized, demand for second hand 3GS phones increased, as did their prices. Apple, in one of their many acts of commercial cynicism, anticipated this increase in demand and rereleased the 3GS, but only offered it with 8 GB of memory—they didn’t want to make the phone too desirable. The original 3GS had been offered with 16 or 32 GB capacities, so the prices of those devices, obviously, further increased as their availability decreased.
I didn’t want to spend hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of dollars on a new or refurbished current or previous model iPhone. Nor did I want to spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars to source an acceptable second hand 3GS 16 GB, the phone I was trying to replace.
Instead, somewhat reluctantly, I ordered a factory refurbished 3GS 8 GB from Apple. And, much like how I wasn’t entirely satisfied nor soured by the result at the repair shop a week prior, this purchase felt similarly so. But what arrived a few days later definitely soured me.
As soon as I unpacked the device and picked it up, it felt off. The feel of the materials was different. The buttons shook in the housing. The mute switch was spongy instead of clicky. The vibration motor rattled. The 3GS was once Apple’s flagship phone, the best of the best. The build quality of what I was looking at now was so poor I spent the next few days trying to determine if I’d somehow bought a counterfeit iPhone.
It turns out what I’d bought was indeed a copy of the 3GS, but it was Apple who copied it from themselves. Yes, they had started making the phone again, but they had revised its production at the same time. No longer needing to be a premium offering, everything about its manufacture had been reduced down to a price, and the refurbishment likely handled in much the same way. For something I interacted with multiple times a day, the constant reminder of how cheaply it had been made further reinforced how it was not the same phone I’d used originally—not even close.
Instead, I was reminded of how my phone was gone, and it didn’t matter that this replacement looked like the original: it wasn’t the original. And every time I picked it up, every time I interacted with it, I knew it wasn’t.
…it was the shoes all over again.
There were other things going on in my life and within my mind that compounded the negative association with the replacement 3GS. Over the next few weeks, my daily use of the phone changed: I interacted with it less and less. As much as I pretended to like it, I eventually grew to resent even the sight of it.
Within three months of getting it, my replacement phone found itself alongside the broken remains of the original, the two devices now locked together in a similar fate, moving with me from house to house, over and over and over…
Nearly ten years pass.
And again, everything changes.
Time is change.
It’s morning—2023. I’m awake.
I wonder if the phone I’d left to charge is as well. I push the home button. Nothing.
If the battery had charged, it should wake up the display and show me the wonderfully soft and brilliantly green battery charged graphic—a sight unique to the original iPhones.
I push the power button next.
The display flickers. It’s subtle, but I see it. It starts briefly and stops just as quickly. I try again. Same result. The back light flashes on and then off, now easily visible through the broken screen. The phone wants to start, but it can’t. I disconnect the low current charger and try the power button one more time. Nothing.
I connect up the phone’s original charger and leave it while I make coffee.
When I return, the phone is still sitting with a blank screen. There’s no indication the battery is charging, and my incredibly useful in-line current meter has yet to be ordered. If it were here, this entire process would be far more straightforward. But it isn’t here, so I need to work with what is.
I casually push the power button.
The display flickers as it had before, but this time, it stays on. I feel my eyes go wide. It’s starting. The Apple logo appears.
No way.
Under the tape and broken glass, the display is working just fine. There are some sparkling pixels, but those are likely caused by tiny pieces of broken glass sitting on the LCD panel itself. I’m amazed. But then the Apple logo disappears. The display goes blank again. The backlight shuts off.
I go to press the power button, but the display lights up before I can. The Apple logo appears. The phone is trying again, and then it restarts, over and over again. This isn’t a great sign.
Board-level issue…
No—
This phone was working before it slowly stopped…
Current—the phone is responding to current. The more I offer it, the more it wants to start. I swap chargers to one for an older iPad Air—an anomaly among Apple chargers, rated for 5.1 volts instead of the usual 5.0 volts. It will allow a higher current draw as well. Slowly waking up a battery is one way to bring it back to life. If that doesn’t work, sometimes you can give it a boost instead.
I don’t even have to push the power button.
As soon as I connect the iPad charger, the phone lights up. The Apple logo remains on the screen, and it remains on the screen for a long time. This is different behaviour. This might be—
The screen goes blank and then switches to the Recovery Mode graphic.
No way!
The phone has successfully started, but it’s confused. It wants to be plugged into a computer with iTunes so it can reload its operating system, a usually non-destructive process to user data.
Everything could still be…
I unplug the charger so I can attach the phone to my computer for recovery. The display goes blank immediately. Unfazed, I continue with my plan, initially missing this key clue as to what’s going on inside the device.
But in connecting up the phone and computer, the phone returns to constantly restarting again. The Recovery Mode graphic never returns.
There is a program on my computer that lets me monitor communications between USB devices attached to it, and according to the software, it never sees the phone connect. How can it? The phone restarts before it has a chance. This is why I couldn’t continue copying pictures from it back in 2013.
But why isn’t it charging…?
And then I realize: it’s the battery. The battery is why the phone won’t start. Apple runs power to the phone through the battery first. If it’s deeply discharged, a standard charger wouldn’t be able to supply enough current needed to charge the battery and power the phone, particularly during a power intensive process like starting it—
Or copying a large amount of data from it.
That’s why the phone powered up without hesitation when connected to the iPad charger: there was enough current and voltage available to make the phone think it had a fully charged battery. But as soon as the charger was unplugged, the illusion of current and voltage vanished, along with the only source of power for the phone.
In the same way water likely shorted out and damaged the GPS receiver, a short in the battery management system could have prevented the battery from ever being charged again. The battery chemistry itself could have also been compromised.
The phone’s instability was due to the ever-depleting power produced by the damaged battery. Voltage would drop below specifications under high power loads and the phone would restart as a result. The behaviour would repeat up until there was nothing left in the battery capable of powering anything, and without a functioning charging circuit…
No amount of gentle waking or energetic boosting would bring a battery back from that.
I pull the phone apart again and check the battery voltage: zero. Absolutely no volts. No wonder it wouldn’t accept or hold a charge.
Why didn’t I check this earlier?
A previous assumption highlighted my inexperience: I guessed the battery in my original 3GS would be in a similar state to the one in my replacement 3GS, a phone that—in the most irritating and contrarian manner imaginable—charged up fine and powered on without issue just the other day. But its battery hadn’t been submerged in water and then left discharged for ten years. In fact, its battery was in near perfect—
Without even thinking, I knew what was going to happen next. I watch myself reach across the desk and grab my replacement 3GS, power it off, remove the exterior screws and the SIM card, and start taking off the display assembly with a suction cup.
Apple uses what can only be described as an excessive amount of unnecessarily strong adhesive to make sure its batteries do not somehow fall out of place while sealed inside a completely nonremovable rear housing of a fully assembled phone that’s also been screwed shut. As I don’t want to damage the rear housing of either phone by trying to swap the batteries, I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to scoop out the insides of both phones and put my 3GS components into the rear housing of the replacement 3GS—the one with the functioning battery.
With the logic board transferred and the display assembly reattached, I close up my now hybrid 3GS, connect it to a USB cable, and pause for a moment before plugging it into my computer.
I’m nervous, incredibly so. For some reason, I expect the phone to erupt in a shower of sparks and smoke now that it has access to a fresh battery to destroy.
But I remind myself: this phone did fine with the current it drew earlier. No sparks, no smoke, no problem—so here it goes.
I plug the cable in.
The display lights up. The Apple logo appears. Now I’m waiting for the Recovery Mode graphic to display. I’m waiting for a long time. The Welcome to iOS 6 animation plays instead. I’m perplexed. This is Setup Mode.
The phone asks me what language I speak and what country it’s in. Despite all the tape and broken glass, I’m able to use the touchscreen just fine, so I tell the phone where it is and how to understand me. Then it asks for a wireless data connection as there is no cellular service available. I enter the Wi-Fi password. The phone connects and tells me it’s finished with setup.
I’m hesitant—the phone is behaving like it’s been factory reset, and that is a destructive process to user data. But up in the top right corner of the display I see something unexpected: the alarm icon. The phone knows it has an alarm set.
Could it be…?
Before I can piece together what’s happening, I am caught again in an emotional reaction I am ill-prepared for. My lock screen wallpaper appears.
To be honest, I’d forgotten what it was, but I feel the sudden recollection, the reconnection to another life that was once my own, the flood of memories and thoughts from a different time—I feel it all.
Is everything…
I unlock my phone. All my customizations and application icons appear just as they did. As far as my phone is aware, I’ve just turned it off and on again. Everything is as it was.
No time has passed.
Nothing has changed.
Holy… shit…
I did it.
I check the photo gallery. All my pictures are there. Though I’m confident the phone is stable, I also don’t want to waste the opportunity I have: I start transferring the image files to my computer immediately. Each one copies without any issue, without any hesitation, without any indication of instability. The time the phone would have restarted at least once has long since passed, and I can see the charging icon beside the battery life indicator.
Once the transfer is complete, I notice the last item copied over is a completely black PNG file. Its resolution matches that of a screen capture, something older iPhones will do if both the power and home buttons are pressed at the same time. During the brief moments the phone was submerged, water may have bridged the contacts for those buttons, triggering a screen capture of the display when it wasn’t displaying anything.
If that’s the case—and I’ve since confirmed that it was—the remaining life of my 3GS was forever altered on November 20, 2013 at 1:02:54 PM.
I never imagined I would ever see the phone working again, and I never imagined it would be me who’d make it happen. But it also makes perfect sense: I was the one responsible for damaging it…
What doesn’t make sense is what happened in the backroom of that repair shop in 2013.
I know I’m a bit predisposed when it comes to electricity, electronics, and technology, but I also know I only have a few hundred hours of observational experience and less than one hundred hours of practical experience when it comes to phone repair. I make no claims to my expertise, only to my perseverance. I was guided mostly by my own good fortune—call it beginner’s luck. I’m not trying to diminish what I accomplished: I’m absolutely proud of what I did and what I learned while doing it.
But from a bigger picture perspective, I still know fuck-all about fixing phones. So why could I achieve in hours what the repair shop deemed impossible?
Because it wasn’t impossible—it wasn’t worth it.
I misunderstood the shop’s intent. I misunderstood the shop when they told me it wasn’t worth it. They weren’t looking out for my financial interests. They were looking out for theirs. They were saying it wasn’t worth it to them. The hours I spent doing the investigation, cleaning, troubleshooting, and housing swap that would result in my 3GS working again were mine to spend freely. It was an exercise in applying what skills I had acquired to see what would happen. I wasn’t trying to get money. I was trying to see if could do it.
Those hours, had they been spent by the shop, would represent hours they couldn’t spend on the assembly line style of repairs that get money. Why would they elect to perform difficult, unknown work when there’s easy, known work available instead?
Imagine some kid pulls up to your shop in a slightly rusty Subaru with a giant wing on the back, brings in an out of date, water-logged iPhone, and requests quotes for advanced repair and data recovery? That’s a low to no-margin job at best. You don’t actually want that job, so charge them for taking a look at the phone, but spend no more than a few minutes if it looks like it will be time consuming work. Charge them for attempting data recovery, but halt at the slightest indicator of difficulty. Keep the phone for a few hours to give them a sense of some work being be performed, and then when they come to pick it up, tell them there’s nothing that can be done.
Make it seem like it will be far, far too expensive—mask your misalignment of intent.
Bury it in semantics.
Make it seem like it’s not worth it to them.
With all my pictures copied over, I completely relax. Those are what I wanted. Everything else is a bonus.
I open up my emails. Everything is there. I open up my messages. Everything is there. All my contacts. All my notes. All my music. All my playlists. Everything is complete. I am delighted.
A system dialog box pops up: multiple email servers are rejecting login attempts. They are for accounts I no longer use. Some of them no longer exist—actually, none of them exist any more. I look through the subject lines of my old email messages. They are conversations from then, about things that are no longer happening, events that have long since come and gone—things I haven’t given any thought to in years.
I scan through the names of those I was messaging at the time. Through various circumstances, I no longer have contact with many of them today, almost all of them now that I think about it.
Friends come and go, but I also know one of them isn’t alive anymore…
There is contact information for coworkers I’d forgotten I had, the names of supervisors from jobs at previous companies I don’t care about anymore. There are the details of those I used to live with and those I used to go camping with. My many friends, their many friends, even some of their families. And then my family, both small and large—though lately, getting smaller.
In my pictures, there are forgotten scenes from my home in Scarborough: pictures from events and trips, parties and quiet moments—the many entities I remember that no longer are. I see my old relationships, friends, family, dogs, cats, animals, cars, landscapes: all the signs I paused to regard and laugh at along the way, all the sights I’d looked upon with such amusement, curiosity, and fascination.
I had grown to finally love my life there—
That the data in the phone were of great importance was an idea I carried with me for weeks and months—even years—after it was damaged. But in looking through it all now, I realize this importance had acquired its own mythology.
In the time since, as new things became important to me, I recalled thinking less and less about it—until I wasn’t thinking about it all. It was only during times of change, when I had to pack up and move somewhere else, when I would inevitably come across my box of disused electronics: I would see my smashed phone among other relics. It was only then when I might give pause for what was, what happened, and what could have been.
So, I have to wonder now—was this ever about the phone?
As I look though my 3GS, I realize it’s filled with echoes—filled with ghosts. Some of them are mine; some of them are others. But I also realize, one way or another, I’ve been carrying them all around with me, in my mind and in that phone, ever since I smashed it to pieces, hid it away, and slowly forgot about it. The phone, its data, its fate—it all had become a metaphor, a metaphor for me, a part of me, a part of someone I was.
…A part of someone I still am.
I find myself ill-prepared for the emotional reaction surrounding the opening of this time capsule.
It’s only now that I know what I didn’t then, but in 2014, about eleven months after that November afternoon, I will be driven from my home among the trees; my home beside the ravine; my home near the lake. It will be by my own doing, by my own sense of it not being worth it—the it in this case being me. So damaged I will have become by my own failure to seek repair, I will intentionally destroy what is left in an act of confusion, frustration, and rage.
Everything will change.
Time is change.
Today—it’s November 20, 2023.
With no sense of sorrow, remorse or regret, nor feelings of relief, elation, justice, or even closure—just the awareness that I am doing it—I start deleting data from my 3GS.
The emails on it were just local copies of what has always been kept on a remote server. Though the accounts the phone tried to access are no longer used, any emails I wanted to keep from that time I already have copies of from when I closed the accounts.
All my old txt messages are records of conversations I’ve long since finished having. Some of them are conversations I would never have again. Some of them conversations I maybe never should have had at all. Some of them, I’m aware, I never got a chance to continue. And some of them were abruptly cut short. But some of them, some of them I’m still having. Either way, I delete them one by one.
I remember being upset over losing my notes, but as I scroll through them now, I don’t understand why. Most of them are of what episodes I’d watched up to in television series I’ve either completed or forgotten about; music I wanted to track down and listen to that I either did or didn’t follow up with; and a collection mental nonsense, made up of clearly half-baked conspiracy theories, musings on the nature of the universe, and ideas about particle physics. Any of the most interesting of them are ideas I’ve since written about or have integrated into my thoughts. Some of them ended up being notes again, only with pencil and paper instead. And, much like I’ve said goodbye to those paper notes one by one over the last few years, I say goodbye to the ones on my phone as well.
The only note I consider keeping is this simple observation on the absurdity of my life in general, a reflection of my existence at the time:
I don’t mind being poor because it gives me time to enjoy stirring up a new jar of peanut butter.
But I delete it anyway. There’s no need to save it because I’ve never forgotten it. There have been many, many jars since then, and while it’s not every jar, I have often remembered that thought and that sentiment as I stir.
The only data I’ve kept without any question or review are my pictures, even the ones that are difficult to see again. These are my memories. As part of their recovery, they will be integrated along side all my other pictures with all my other memories. They will fill in some of the gaps within my photographic and mental timeline. Like any of my other pictures, the ones I like to look at, I will seek out. The ones I don’t, I won’t. Sometimes I might not have a choice, but that’s how my pictures work. That’s how my memories work. They come and go, and sometimes the rough ones crop up among the beautiful ones. They are all linked together: if I tug on one, I tug on them all—if I try to forget any, I risk forgetting the rest.
Now all that’s left is the nearly 12 GB of stored music and associated playlists still on the phone. The music files I never actually lost—they were just copies of what I already had saved on my computer. But I remember being sad about the playlists.
I had created them using the Genius music matching service built into iTunes. Each playlist was associated with various moods and activities and was expressed through my entire music collection at the time. While not quite as intensely associated with my memories as my pictures, these playlists represent a synthesis of lyric and tone I used to relate to times and places—my themes.
There was music for driving, walking, and partying. I had music for when I was writing, or drinking, or smoking. There was music for moods I was in and moods I wanted to invoke. My house was filled with speakers, so my home was filled with music, and I could play it all from my 3GS.
I plan to keep the music and playlists as they are on the phone, turning it into a historical iPod: any time I feel like visiting Scarborough circa 2012 through 2013, I can stream a playlist to my home stereo now.
Just like I used to then.
With the data sorted, my attention turns to my 3GS as it exists today: a collection of parts—the smashed and broken display assembly from the original phone with its logic board surround by the rear housing and battery from the replacement 3GS.
My sense of continuity suggests it would be fitting to leave the phone it as it is, since that’s how it ended up. But maintaining such a linear and simplistic view does not feel entirely accurate or complete, or even appropriate, in this situation.
Once more, intent informs me as to what happens next. I wanted to see if I could get the phone working again. I could, and I did. I wanted to see if I could recover any data from the phone. I could, and I recovered it all.
But in terms of intending to repair the phone…
I’m not sure if I could consider the phone as it is now as being repaired in the strictest sense of the word: its screen is covered in tape; the glass is cracking, small pieces of it are missing, and tiny pieces of it are on the LCD panel; parts of the backlight assembly are visible; the rear housing is mismatched to another model; in my swiftness to get it all reassembled, I didn’t put the camera back in; and the metal shielding for the logic board is sitting in a pile beside the phone along with the remaining interior and exterior screws.
This is not how the phone was, and if the origins of the word are explored, the idea of a return to place, to state is foundational to the concept of repair.
In the past, this idea of place was an actual location, a state in the national sense of the word. The concept is now better expressed in the word repatriate. Now the ideas of place and state within the origins of repair are free to take on new meaning: place could refer to a time, state could refer to a configuration—or perhaps some combination of the two.
I owe my 3GS the opportunity to be returned as closely as possible to the state it was in before I drowned it and before I smashed it—a token of apology for having first accidentally and then deliberately damaging it.
To do that, I’ll need a replacement battery and replacement display assembly. And what better source for those parts than a namesake phone that’s been here the entire time, my replacement 3GS: finally able to fulfill a purpose I did not previously understand. It was never meant to replace my 3GS—it was meant to repair it. So it will.
And I have.
I like the way this outcome feels. There is a symmetrical quality to the result. No longer linear, the paths of these two devices loop and intertwine, one returning the other from the same, forgotten state, from a place of no time.
Both phones will now continue on together.
Every thing changes.
Time is change.
