Eclectic’s Law™️
You’ve probably heard of Murphy’s Law, at least if you’re a native English speaker. The origins of this pessimistic expression are a bit fuzzy, and there are variations out there, but the way I learned it was:
Anything that can go wrong, will
But a while ago, I came up with my own law, which I’ll call Eclectic’s Law™️.
Anything that CAN’T go wrong, will
I’ve mentioned it online and in person dozens of times, and so far no one has said they’ve heard of it before, so I’m going to claim it as my own invention.
If someone else also thought of it, good for them. They can be the Alfred Russel Wallace (who independently developed his own theory of evolution but whose name nearly no one knows) to my Charles Darwin, or vice versa.
Why do I bring this up? If you really want to know, the play-by-play of the series of problems I wouldn’t have expected to go wrong. is below. Long story short version, technology is great when it works but when it doesn’t, things can go worse than you’d imagine. And also, I am apparently way too dependent on technology.
Let’s hope that nothing else unexpected goes wrong and that I’m done with Eclectic’s Law™️ for the month, or at least today!
The deets for those who are interested in tech or want to sympathize with me — In the past three days:
Our power went out for several hours due to a severe storm that wasn’t even predicted (yay climate change!)
My phone, which had been acting up for a few weeks, completely stopped connecting to WiFi and Bluetooth, and the flash, flashlight, and rear camera stopped working.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the issue might be and tried different fixes (resetting network settings, etc.) to no avail.Backing up my phone to iCloud on the 1st try failed over the cell network. The 2nd try worked.
(Apple later told me this was likely because the hardware issue was affecting one of the “bands” of connectivity, which would explain why my cell connection was slower recently)”Backing up locally took over 24 hours, during which my daughter and I avoided using my computer so we didn’t accidentally knock out the USB cord (since I couldn’t back up over the broken WiFi) or mess something else up.
The restore I was told to do by Square Trade didn’t work to fix the problems. So I had to go through the claims process online a second time, then talk to wait to talk an agent to okay my claim request to get it repaired.
I brought it to the Apple Store 40 minutes away. The one bright spot is it took only an hour to repair! And so I thought Eclectic’s Law™️ could be put to bed at least for a little while. BUT
Apple techs forgot to put my SIM card back in my phone. Seriously? The odds that they could find it were apparently slim to none, so I needed to contact AT&T.
After an hour and a half of researching options online and working with AT&T support, trying to activate my phone number for an eSIM even though AT&T had the wrong EID number for my phone (which is apparently uncommon unless Eclectic’s Law™️ is in full force) and not having a second phone to receive authorization codes, etc., she fixed it and my phone FINALLY works.
Hours and hours of headaches keeping me from doing my work, watching TYT, hanging out with family, and interacting on social media.
I know I’m extremely fortunate compared to millions of people in Ukraine who don’t know if they will even have a country to call home tomorrow, much less the rest of the world, but it doesn’t make this tragicomedy of technological errors any less annoying.
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