Jon Dawson: Justin Bieber in Kinston, iClouds and photos from a drowned phone
A photo of the iCloud hovering over La Grange retrieved from Jon Dawson’s waterlogged LG phone.
I found an old phone in a box during an office clean-out last weekend. The phone hadn't been discarded because there were 200 or so photos on it that had yet to be retrieved.
At least once a month I hook up all of the family phones to a laptop and extract the photos. I seem to be alone in this, as most people store their photos in some magical cloud that Steve Jobs tethered to the Apple corporate headquarters in Cupertino, CA. By the way, has anyone else noticed the weather started to get crazy around the time the Apple iCloud was introduced in 2011? Mother Nature doesn't seem to be fond of selfies.
Tax Deduction #2 in one of the photos saved from my waterlogged LG phone - Photo by Jon Dawson / Neuse News
My first experience with a cellular phone was an Audiovox bag phone that weighed about 10 pounds. It was issued to my dad for work, but he loaned it to me one weekend when a couple of friends and I decided to invade the record shops in Raleigh. Even at the age of 17, I was a sane driver, but my car had more miles on it than U.S. 70, so the phone was a nice security blanket. Also, it was fun to pretend to be on the phone at a stoplight while the great unwashed in the cars around us looked on in envy.
You can scoff at that 10-pound phone all you want, but it was a better telephone than any smartphone currently on the market. Of course with this phone, you couldn't scroll Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, PutzPalace or anything of the sort. What you could do is travel to the center of the earth and still have a strong signal. If you examine the footage, Neil Armstrong is clearly seen using one of these phones to contact mission control during the first moon landing.
To this day I know farmers who keep ancient bag phones in their trucks while working in remote areas of Jones County that render modern-day smartphones completely useless. There's nothing more disheartening than seeing a grown man throwing an iPhone in the air in the hopes of getting a better cell signal.
Another photo from my deceased LG phone. This product actually existed and made it to a Kinston store. Photo by Jon Dawson / Neuse News
The phone I found in my office was an LG with a slide-out keyboard. I loved that phone and would probably still be using it if not for a torrential downpour that soaked me as I waited for Tax Deduction #1 to exit a school bus after a field trip. There were no clouds in the sky, but as soon as I'd walked about 20 feet from my car, the bottom fell out. Water barreled out of gutters, lightning lit up the sky, and I started looking for two of each animal. The phone was in my shirt pocket and I was wearing a jacket, but it didn't matter - the phone had left the building.
After leaving the phone submerged in (yes, uncooked) rice in an attempt to dry it out, it miraculously powered up. I thought we'd saved the phone, but it was irrevocably damaged. Although the slide-out keyboard still worked, the buttons on the actual keypad were toast. At the time companies were giving away free phones like candy so I wasn't sweating the thought of a new phone, but I wanted to retrieve the pictures from my old one. Hooking the phone up to a computer didn't work, and it was the only time I've seen a computer generate the error message "Dude, it ain't gonna happen".
Truants in a tire. Photo by Jon Dawson / Neuse News
As life marches on and we get busier and busier, things we intend on doing fall by the wayside. Once in a while I'd come across the old fried phone and try to extract the photos, but nothing seemed to work. I even contacted a company that specialized in retrieving data off of defunct computers and phones. For the amount of money they were asking to pull 204 family pictures off of this phone, I could have started a second family in another town and had enough money left over for the forthcoming litigation.
My band Third Of Never dueling the Avett Brothers for retail space. - Photo by Jon Dawson / Neuse News
When I came across this phone a few days ago, I decided to insert a microSD card in an attempt to transfer the photos. I inserted a blank card but the phone wouldn't recognize it. Knowing phones and computers have personalities as stable as the average UFC champion, I tried a different microSD card, which to my astonishment worked. After a minute or two, I coerced the half-functioning buttons on this waterlogged phone to move the photos to the card. Once the transfer was done, I plopped the card into the computer and victory was mine.
The retrieval of these photos has probably been my greatest accomplishment of recent memory. What can I say, it's been a slow decade.
Contact Jon Dawson at jon@neusenews.and www.jondawson.com.
