The iOS 8 Teaching Moment

The iOS 8 Teaching Moment starts the moment your almost 14 year-old son hands you his iPhone 5c and tells you there is a problem.

“Dad, can you help me. My phone isn’t working?”

I nod my head, take the phone and silently call upon the ghost of Steve Jobs to visit me again. He doesn’t answer and I am not sure why the phone has chosen to imitate a brick.

“Did you try to download the iOS 8 update?”

He nods his head and when I ask him if he backed up his phone before he shakes his head at me and asks me not to restore it.

“I know you don’t want to lose your data but this thing is a great phone and a lousy brick. If you can’t access your data it won’t matter if it is on there or not because it is inaccessible anyway.”

I tell him it’s too late for him to stay up and watch me work and he makes one last plea to save his data. I nod my head but I don’t tell him I am unwilling to wait until I can take him to the Apple store to check it out.

 iOS 8 Internet News Gathering

As he walks out of the room I throw on my headset, turn on iTunes and run a quick search online to see if there is something I can do to fix it without wiping the data and starting over.

Blue Ocean is singing Into The Ocean and for a moment I stop what I am doing because the lyrics have caught my ear.

“Where is the coastguard
I keep looking each direction
For a spotlight, give me something
I need something for protection
Maybe flotsam junk will do just fine
the jetsam sunk, I’m left behind
I’m treading for my life believe me”

Something about this moment reminds me of the things I wrote about in Is Life A Series Of Coincidences Or Do Things Happen For A Reason and I feel irritated.

Irritated because my son should have backed the phone up. I have had this conversation with him before and yet here I am spending time trying to fix something that shouldn’t be broken.

Even though it is a good teaching moment and a worthwhile lesson part of me is irritated I can’t find a solution. I like helping the children and he comes to me for help with less frequency than before.

Some of that is good. He needs to focus on figuring out who he is. He needs to learn how to be his own man and how to look out for himself. He needs to learn to take care of these things in advance and to work on problem solving so that he can be self sufficient.

But he is barely into his teens so I have to give him a break.

I can’t say I would have been any different at his age.

For a moment I get lost in thought and something I hear makes me think about Field of Dreams.

I have very few regrets in life but those I do are massive beasts that sometimes break free of their chains long enough to torment me. It is part of why the quote above has become so meaningful to me.

It is a mantra I sometimes repeat to myself, “this might be the only day so go after it hard.”

It motivates me to spend more time searching for a solution to transform the brick back into a phone but I can’t find anything that looks promising and so I decide to restore the phone.

That kid of mine will be frustrated but I’ll tell him I did the best I could and remind him about the importance of backing things up. It fits with what I have tried to teach him and personal philosophies about life and work.

I can’t publish posts like Do The Work- The Write Way To Write unless I am willing to live it.

Speaking of which the reason that post and this one have the same picture is the one that used to top the page of the other post was lost during the hosting move last January and I didn’t want to leave a big red x where it was supposed to be.

Something about that Field of Dreams cornfield seemed to ask me to put it in both places and so I did.

Maybe it is the sense that if you could wander into the corn you might find the answers to important questions. Can’t say if those are things youa are ready to see/learn about now or if the universe requires you to wait a bit longer before you can find out what and why.

That is not so very different from searching for a solution to transform the brick.

And now that midnight has come and gone I need to wrap this up and find my way to my bed. But when I do pull the covers across my body and shut my eyes I’ll slip in dreamland knowing I did my best and that will be enough to send me off with a smile.