Last week my beloved BlackBerry Z10 bricked on me. I have no idea why, but after the alarm waking me up as normal (and switching on my Sonos system and playing NPR automatically), the red notification light started blinking almost constantly and I couldn’t get it to power on. I tried a battery pull, recharging it, trying another battery, but nothing. I tried connecting it to my PC, but BlackBerry Link failed to detect it. A quick scan of the forums (fora?) suggested a hardware issue. So that was that.
I spent the rest of the day realizing how much I relied on my phone – for checking up on the kids when they were at home after school and I was at work, for making arrangements with the gf, for storing all of my passwords (in a secure app), for reminding me of my meetings and appointments…just so much. I was also forced to check my mail (on the five different accounts I have) via webmail instead, which just seemed so much effort: having to log on to a site just to check my mail seemed so archaic. I also discovered that my go-to action when I have more than a minute to spare – waiting for my coffee to brew, waiting in the cafeteria checkout line, dropping the kids off at the pool – is to get my phone out and check Facebook, or check the news, or crackberry.com… It’s truly sad, I know, but that’s what I’ve apparently been reduced to.
I somehow struggled on through the day, until I could get to the AT&T store where I purchased said BlackBerry. After a half an hour wait, I got to see the resident ‘expert’, who was about as much of an expert as an Apple store ‘genius’ is a genius – he tried powering it on, and then gave up. He told me that they couldn’t do anything there, and I needed to take my BlackBerry in to their central Service Center. This didn’t really surprise me, as during my half hour wait I checked around the store and saw that they’re not even carrying the Z10 any more. Which I personally believe is because they’re being paid by Apple to do all they can to encourage people to buy iPhones and nothing else. As evidenced by the huge array of iPhones and iPads they carry, and the constant offers to ‘upgrade’ me to an iPhone…
The Service Center was 20 miles away, which meant that I’d have to wait until the next morning, and take time off work just to get there during their opening hours. The AT&T rep did tell me that I should call them first, to which I retorted “On what? My phone’s bricked, remember??” but the point seemed to be lost on him. He kind of reminded me of the big, gormless one in Shaun Of The Dead… Anyway, the next morning I duly went down to the Service Center, where, after another 30 minute wait, I got to be treated like an imbecile again. “Did you try switching it on?”, “Did you check the battery?” – and then got to watch them try exactly the same things anyway. *sigh* But eventually, they conceded it was indeed defective, and gave me a replacement unit. “Is it a refurb?” I asked. “It’s ‘like new’.” “So a refurb?” “‘Like New’…” “So ‘not new’, then?” *glare*. Marvelous. Still, it’s not like mine was new at this stage, either…
This at least gave me a working phone, but obviously lacking in all my apps, settings, accounts, contacts, calendar, etc. But fortuitously, I’d taken a complete backup two days previously, so when i got home I restored that (which took almost an hour) and I was back in business – as the constant dinging of a day’s worth of emails, texts, missed calls, voicemails and assorted other notifications as my phone caught up attested. I took the opportunity of tinkering around with it to set up another email account – this one a Microsoft Exchange account with my agency. This was remarkably easy to set up (even though the agency said it couldn’t be done) so now I have six email accounts all feeding into the excellent BlackBerry Hub (plus text, BBM, Facebook, Twitter, and everything else).
But then disaster struck. Again. After 10 minutes of doing nothing, my phone locked itself (as usual). I typed in my password, but it said this was wrong. I know my own password, so I tried it again. Wrong. And again. Still wrong. I wondered if the new phone had a different hardware password, but as I had done a full re-install, that couldn’t be it. No matter what I tried, it just wouldn’t unlock. And after 20 incorrect attempts, BlackBerry kicks into full secure mode, and wipes the entire contents of the phone (displaying a little shredder icon whilst it is doing it, which is a nice touch). Dammit! So I re-reloaded it from the backup (another hour), re-added my Exchange email account (which was the only thing I’d changed since the backup), and was up and running again. Until the phone locked again, whereupon it wouldn’t accept my password again, and I was forced to wipe the whole thing a second time.
Not to be fooled a third time, this time I decided to add the Exchange account before doing the full restore, to see if that was causing the problem. And this time, I noticed that when it was asking me for a password a second time (which I did think as odd…), it was asking me for a device password – because the wipe had wiped out the one I had set, and in the interests of security it needs a device password if you have an Exchange account on it – and not the email account password! So I’d been resetting my device password to my Exchange email account password, and then wondering why my Blackberry didn’t accept my old device password! D’oh! See, I knew there was a good reason for keeping all of your passwords the same (clearly I don’t…).
Anyway, having figured that particular brain-fart out, I finally got my Z10 back to where it was 36 hours previously. And it was undoubtedly the longest 36 hours of my life. I never again want to be without my phone for that long – it’s just so debilitating, disconcerting, and discombobulating. I guess they call it a crackberry for good reason…
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