Story: A King De-Phoned
The following is a short story / writing exercise I'm titling A King De-Phoned. It's a fairly mundane tale of first-world problems involving relatively privileged individuals and occasional hyperbole. That said, this stuff actually happened and was pretty shitty.
-The day had, in all honesty, already been going poorly. My father and I had hit several roadbumps as we tried to move all of my parents' furniture into their new apartment.
Only one item remained, however -- the item we had pointedly avoided and left for last. Their grumpy old pillow-top king-size mattress from an era long past. It had seen several moves, and this was to be it's last -- to the dump.
We grunted and fought up every step the less-than-king-sized stairwell, marvelling at the sheer density of the beast. We contorted and pushed and cursed the manufacturers who'd made this thing as close to a cube as they could get away with while still qualifying as a mattress.
After severely damaging the walls and ceilings of the stairwell and several breaks to tend our poorly constructed spines we'd finally made it. We celebrated our minor victory as we headed to the local dump, the corpse strapped to the back of our beat up old pickup. The ride was unexpectedly smooth, which should have heralded trouble ahead.
At the dump, with spirits high at our day's work being at an end, we backed into the assigned spot and hoisted the mattress into it's final resting place. A bin far below filled with other such abandoned furniture and debris. Our work done we planned our next steps (which involved much food and merrymaking).
As we pulled away, however, a beacon cried. That beacon was my father's bluetooth headset informing us his phone had just gone out of range.
Shit.
We hurried back to our assigned spot, now occupied by two other vehicles ready to begin their material confessionals.
"Please wait," I pleaded as my father began searching around the parking spaces, "my father's lost his phone!".
The two individuals seemed understanding. A sun-glassed man in his 40's who offered us spare rubber gloves and a woman who I can only describe as "most likely a tenured professor of anthropology". They both expressed muted concern and sympathy, pausing their work momentarily.
Not wanting to hold up these kind people I called the phone. We heard it weep pitifully from far below. In the bin.
Shit.
"Oh no, did it fall in the bin?" commented the woman as she proceeded to throw an armful of splintered wood into the very same bin. I stood stunned for a full half-second, unable to process the sudden shift in priority. She threw another arm-load of wood into the bin below.
Normally my father is one to cause a scene in such situations with a carefully placed "are you fucking stupid?" or a gentle "fuck off", but alas he was preoccupied and I couldn't bring myself to duke it out with an esteemed anthropology professor.
We managed to call over the supervisor after several minutes, who closed the bin to the shock and dismay of the rest of our small bin-sharing community. "You're telling me I need to finish at a different bin? This is ridiculous!" exclaimed the man, throwing shut the back of his truck in frustration as we stared helplessly at the now-full bin below.
The supervisor slowly descended to the bin below and entered that place which is forbidden to mere citizens. He lazily moved a couple pieces of wood shrapnel and listlessly shifted the old mattress. I continued to call the phone, however now it lay silent beneath its grave of scrap wood, broken chairs, and rolls of old carpet.
I watched my father race through the stages of grief as he mourned the device from which his entire business was conducted. Despite his frequent criticisms against modern technology, he too had fallen victim to utter dependency upon the sacred rectangle.
We forewent our intended celebrations and went instead to the closest phone store to begin the process of reclaiming his digital existence. As we stood at the counter, however, the young man asked my father "Can I get your account pin?"
"What account pin?"
"Your account has a pin, sir, you probably set it up when you opened the account"
"I've had this account for years, I've never needed a pin"
"We need to pin to unlock the account"
My father proceeded to guess pins until his account was locked out of the store computer, resulting in a call to the "back room" support. They changed his pin, he only needed to accept the change in his email.
"How am I supposed to do that? I don't have my phone." Silence.
Naturally we tried logging into his gmail account on my phone next, only to be prompted with a "Accept this login on your phone", which we skipped, then were presented with a password prompt.
"Dad what's your gmail password?..."
Now, my father is a one-password kind of man. He's been using the same damn password since before passwords had rules. With the addition of these rules, however, he's been forced to use variations and mutations of the same password to get through the signup process of modern sites. This could involve capitalizing a letter, adding some special characters to the end, etc. Combined with the convenience of "remember me" and "save this password", these variations are lost to time. By my estimates the last time my father actually had to use his google password was in 2018, and his password manager is, of course, Google.
We didn't manage to log in, but through the efforts of the kind store-folk we got our hands on a new simcard. Of phones, however, we had no such luck. Every phone in their store was more than $1000 and was only available on contract. We didn't have $1000 to blow, and my father wasn't about to get roped into paying interest on a cellphone.
So we went to the local Walmart hoping they'd have some cheaper options. They, too, only offered contract phones -- their young and innocent mobile expert was baffled by the very idea of simply purchasing a phone outright.
Finally we tried Staples, the trusty office supply store that desperately wants to be Best Buy. Mercifully had in stock a single $200 motorola phone. This was still a painful unplanned cost, but $200 is an easier pill to swallow than dropping a grand on a 3-year old flagship. As we left the store they locked up the front door for closing. A close call.
We stopped by the new apartment to try his laptop, which theoretically was still logged into Gmail. I sat in dread as the ancient hand-me-down device boot-looped 6 times in a row with a harrowing mechanical "click" on each loop. "It does that, it will boot eventually," my father said with confidence. It did, but I need to add "new laptop for dad" to my emergency fund list.
Finally we booted -- lo and behold the laptop was still logged into his gmail account! Changing the password, however, was another close call. Without his phone for a second factor we needed to use his recovery email which pointed to his business email. That email address? A no-longer-in-production domain name which by the grace of some god somewhere he hadn't yet let expire. He still had it forwarding to his new business email address which thankfully wasn't gmail. This account we did have the password for -- it was the one place that still let him use his default password.
We changed the password and were finally at the end of this journey. The new phone was simmed and logged-in.
For all that I lament how our phones spy, track, and watch every single thing we do, it saved my father's business this day as his work photos, emails, and contacts all downloaded seamlessly along with his bank passwords which were stored in his google account.
There's lesson here, for me at least. In this modern tech dystopia we were just one almost-expired domain away from complete disaster. My father is far from tech-illiterate. He's kept pace with every new tehchological stride from the colour television to 5G internet; he manages his own website and can do things in Excel that I don't understand at all. A computer is just another tool for him, however, like a very annoying power drill with ads. Tech security isn't something that's obvious to people that don't work with computers 12 hours/day -- while those of us who live our whole lives on our glowing rectangle have our password managers and multi-factor auth, those who don't can easily find themselves locked out of a complex net of security co-dependencies that aren't intuitive.
Please take the time now and then to check with your parents, grandparents, or friends who aren't chronically computer-dependant. Use this story as a wedge to make sure they're never a single boot-loop away from an e-disaster.