No calendar. No Uber. Dead in the water.
My phone had stopped getting data in New York, and I was being extremely calm about it.
“I may die without data,” I wrote while asking for help. A few minutes later I clarified that I had been power cycling the phone every two hours. No joke, I said. It still was not fixed.
The phone itself appeared to be fine until it was not. Calls were not the problem. The little computer in my pocket had become the control panel for the day, and without a connection the control panel was mostly decorative.
This was my first couple of months full-time at Reonomy. The calendar held meetings across product, engineering, hiring, and the office move. Uber filled the gaps when the subway or the schedule did not cooperate. Email and chat carried the questions that could not wait until I was back at a desk.
Losing data did not make any of those things disappear. It only made me late and unaware of them.
I tried the usual sequence. Restart the phone. Wait. Restart it again. Ask whether the problem might be the device. I had an extra SIM and wanted to try swapping that before replacing anything. At that point I did not care which tiny piece of the system had failed. I wanted the bars to come back.
There was something ridiculous about being this dependent on a phone. I had worked through data center failures and production incidents with much larger consequences. This was one person with one bad connection.
But that one person was standing somewhere in New York without his schedule or a ride, sending increasingly dramatic messages whenever the data returned long enough to deliver them.
The final note was simple: crazy, I have an extra SIM, can we try a new one?