I have made a terrible mistake

Why yes, I am stealing images from my own posts.  Sue me.

Except I know I made a terrible mistake.  A terribly, horribly life-changing mistake.

Recently Sprint started nudging me to install the new system update.  Well, I made that mistake once before and it ruined my phone people!  I’m not about to start that again.  But Sprint isn’t one to give up easily.  I can’t find any way to turn off that damn reminder so every time I wake my phone the message lurks there waiting to trip me up.

I even searched online hoping to find someone out there who had shut up the Beast but all I found were whines about how awful the 2015 update was.  That of course added fuel to the fire in my belly to defeat the monster.  (Wow Janey, dramatic much?)  This has been going on for weeks now and over the weekend I finally had had enough.

Saturday afternoon I copied several of my phone’s folders to our computer.  I imported all the photos and video to that computer too.  Did you know that every time you open a page in the browser on your phone any images are saved?  Hell, the photos I’ve deleted were all saved too.  There were over 5,000 images in the import folder when it was done!  When I took time to scroll through them the next day I deleted all but a couple hundred or so.  I’d love to know how to avoid having all those images saved in the first place.  Anyone?  Anyone?

After attempting to protect the information I wanted to keep I took the next step, one I’d been avoiding since I inadvertently installed the first update – I reset my phone to the factory defaults.

Cue dramatic pause while that sinks in.

Yep, it was a drastic move by a desperate woman.  I wanted to go back to where my phone was when I first got it so I could tell it to stop looking for updates at all.  I’m not a fan of change; I may have mentioned that in a previous post or four.  However, unsurprisingly this ended in disaster more surely than installing the update might have.

There had been no folder for my contacts.  Everyone I knew, whether close personal friends, family members or frequented businesses – gone in the blink of an eye.  Well okay, it took a little longer than the blink of an eye; call it poetic license.  My contacts folder was bare.  In addition, all my apps were gone.  I knew that would happen – hell, I made a list of them so I’d remember which ones to download again.  But I forgot one thing.

I’m on my daughter’s family plan.  To use Google Play I had to log-in with the dummy account she set up for me.  And that information was saved in the phone’s Notebook app, which was wiped out along with everything else.

To add insult to injury?  Even back at the phone’s default settings I couldn’t find the place where you can turn off the automatic updates.  I’m not sure it even really exists.  Sprint is still nudging … hell, now its outright poking me to install the update.  Sigh.

If anyone needs me I’ll be curled in the fetal position under my desk.