I hate my iPhone and now I know for sure that my iPhone hates me.
Not only did I survive a few days without a smartphone, I kind of enjoyed it. I didn’t even lose my cool when my data disappeared. There was nothing I could do about it. It was strangely liberating. But now it’s back.
To get permission from the corporate mothership to download work email to our phones, employees must agree to a wipe-out clause. We have to use a passcode on the phone and if we try and fail to input the passcode correctly, the phone will reset and all of its data will disappear. This isn’t an unusual demand. It’s to guard against the theft of corporate secrets.
Last Tuesday, my phone prompted me to make my regular ninety-day password change, so I did. Or so I thought. Apparently I made a mistake because when I tried to get into the phone it locked me out. First for a minute, then three minutes and then an hour at a time. What had I done? I didn’t know.
To compound the problem, it seems I changed my Apple ID password at some point and either didn’t make a note of it or wrote it down in my now-locked phone. The only way to reset the password online was to receive a special code on my “trusted Apple device” – yes, my locked phone.
What followed was a runaround of going to a store and allowing an employee to put my SIM card into her phone so she could retrieve a code from Apple – it was the technology version of lemmings following each other off a cliff. The result was a phone wiped clean of data, and restored to just a phone. It was no longer smart. Apple told me it would be more than two weeks before it could be restored.
I did figure out a workaround and got everything back more quickly. This kind of thing can happen to anyone. A simple error. A momentary lapse of memory. Many social media friends told me about their own misadventures that lead to data wipes. I will change my ways. No longer will I retrieve work email on my phone. If something’s urgent, people will find me another way. There are lots of other ways.
There is only one thing more frustrating than what happened with my phone. It’s the well-meaning people who tell me what I “should have done” to avoid the problem. I always appreciate your comments but I beg of you, please don’t. I promise you, whatever it is, I tried it or it wasn’t part of the equation. To err is human and I reserve the right to my flawed humanity! But thank you.
Talk about corporate overkill when there are so many other options to protect data that doesn’t require a complete wipe of a phone especially if you’re only picking up E-mails.