Sometime in the last few years of Dad’s life.
Dad needed a new iPhone. He went to a Spectrum store.
He didn’t remember his Apple ID or his Yahoo password, so they set him up with new ones. The path of least resistance. The easy thing.
He lost every email he’d ever sent or received. Every backup. Every contact. Every photo backed up to the cloud. And after that, he had phone trouble every day until he died — apps that wouldn’t work correctly, contacts that had vanished, the ghosts of a digital life that was no longer accessible to him.
I tried repeatedly to get the old accounts back. Apple has processes for this. They’re not impossible. But they require exactly the kind of documentation and persistence that’s hard when you’re in your eighties and just wanted a phone that works.
We couldn’t get them back.
The Spectrum store was trying to help. I believe that. They did the thing that seemed like the easy solution in the moment. They did not know they were erasing thirty years of someone’s digital correspondence.
Someday I will use this story when I explain to Dylan why he should never, ever let someone set up a “new account” to solve a problem that could be fixed with the existing one.
(Shaking fist at Spectrum.)