Upgrade, Downgrade, Passing Grade, Failing Grade...

Aaaand I'm back.

Aside from now having a lot less free space on my laptop's hard drive (long story), my technical problems seem to have become something of the past; all I have to do now is deal with the fallout, the cleanup, and the catching up.

<sigh>

In any case, I have a new annoyance (just one of many) to share with you this evening.

To begin, I have to admit that my family has been sorely remiss in maintaining currency in our technology division. That is to say, we have been using old-fashioned "flip" type cell phones for at least the past five years, with nary an app in sight.

Until this past weekend, when the adults in my immediate family all became iPhone users. The adjustment has been interesting; despite a great deal of reading in advance of the purchase, I have an uncanny ability to forget how to do something just at the moment I want to do it, and then remember later when it's too late. (For example, missing a great photo of a beautiful double rainbow on the way to work one day because by the time I remembered how to access the camera and zoom it in, I was in heavy traffic and could not take the photo until both rainbows had faded from view -- if I had been using my regular camera, I probably would have been able to fire off at least five or six good images.)

Learning curve aside, I have to admit the darn thing is fun to play with... but that teaching my parents how to use their phones is proving a bit more difficult than I had anticipated.

But wait, I hear you say, you haven't used the word "annoying" even once yet! What gives?

The answer is simple: upgrades. Two, in fact, of very different kinds.

The first upgrade was a slightly unpleasant surprise during the actual purchase. I had spent a great deal of time on the Verizon website, picking through their calling plan information with a virtual fine-toothed comb so we could budget for the new phones accurately. Imagine our surprise, then, to be told that there would be an additional $30 "upgrade charge" per phone, a charge I had not found listed anywhere during my online studies. Oh yes, I'm sorry, said our sales representative, they're applying this to everyone who upgrades from an older phone to a new one, or from a regular phone to a smartphone. Okay, Verizon, I get it; the iPhone is heavily subsidized and you need to wring as much cash out of each one as possible... but it would be nice if you warned your customers in advance of this otherwise nearly invisible $30 fee.

The second upgrade was an even bigger surprise, although one that (I hope!) has no direct financial impact on any of us. You see, I spent some time this evening literally sitting between my parents on the family room sofa, walking them through some of their phones' basic operations step-by-step. We covered answering calls, reading and clearing messages, basic camera operation, how to view photos... all the kinds of things smartphone users take for granted but that they had never had to worry about with the older, simpler "dumb" phones. Things were going well (to be honest, better than I had feared at first) when I ran into a bit of a problem.

The subject at the time was ringtones, and once we had established that they should use different ringtones (and that I was going to be spending some time creating new custom ringtones for them), we were having fun comparing all the built-in sounds to the custom tones I was already wasting using my phone's memory for. I told my father he could choose different vibration patterns for the phone as well as different sounds, showed him how to do it, and turned to show my mother.

And simply could not find the setting on her phone. Several minutes of frantic tapping, swiping, and (I have to admit) cussing later, a dim bulb flickered on over my head. My father and I both had black iPhones while my mother and sister had the white models. Could it be...? I tapped my way through the menus on my phone to "Software Update" and very quickly had a message on the screen telling me my iPhone was running iOS6 and there were no further updates available. I then did the same thing on my mother's white iPhone...

...and promptly discovered that it was still running the older version of iOS. Oh, sure, it was offering to download and install the update right then and there (at no cost, thankfully), but we were all so tired by that point that we agreed I would return and do the update tomorrow... and we all now assume that my sister's white iPhone will need the same update.

All four phones were bought together, at the same time, in the same store, and came out of the same inventory stack. Why, Verizon, o why, are they running different versions of the operating system?!?

That is annoying. In fact, I think I can honestly say it is frakking annoying, since I am now guaranteed to have to dedicate another 30-60 minutes of an already busy day to doing what an equipment vendor should have done for me before giving me their equipment.

And now, if you will excuse me, I have another couple of thousand apps to sort through while I try to find some that mimic the functions of my decrepit old PDA that I had not realized I truly do need at work until after belatedly joining the smartphone revolution...