This continues my tale of woe and Thursday. While heading toward home, I decided to run a few errands. A stop at the Del Norte BART area Safeway netted me a salad, some fruit, drink. If you need NON-cow dairy – this is the place to go. A huge wall cooler with all the alternatives ranging from sheep & goats milk through soy, almond, oat …. etc. What they don’t have? Half&Half. They did have whipping cream. But I really don’t need to add that to my coffee…Do I?
From there I headed south on San Pablo following “MY SAYDZ.” Yes, it is a good, bad pun. Yes, it actually was a Mercedes GLC 300. $48-52K. Reply from Rebecca – room for the whole M$HPACHA? Quick stop at JoAnns and then home.
Heading up to the craft room, I go to start Pattern Keeper. Blank stare at the passcode. Four Digits. Should be easy, automatic even. But my mind is totally blank. I think I know what it is, but I am wrong and get timed out. Then I start to panic. I have the same lovely four digits for several things, means that I avoid face recognition (which I hate and doesn’t work well for most women with glasses and surgical masks regardless of skin color). But that means that Safari, phone, tablet are all locked… as was my PC.
The PC turned out to be the easiest. you blow that several times and it asks you if you want to reset. Yes, done, move on. Apple? Infinite do-loop of going no where. You need the passcode/word to log in to your account. You can’t reset. You can wipe and start over, but you have to be able to access your account. The phone call back failed to recognize me hitting “1” on the keypad so dropped me. I gave up and headed to bed early. This was after getting timed out on my tablet which was recording my number of failing tries. When it was up to waiting 15 minutes before trying again ….
I awoke at 0230 to find that my brilliant plan of leaving an audiobook running to prevent my phone from timing out didn’t work. Then was unable to use my new backup drive to actually back up my MAC. Frustration level climbing I picked up my phone and followed George’s advice – let your fingers do the walking. X X X X – phone is open. I find a safe place and write down those four digits.
So – lesson learned. If you are over ….say …. the age at which people normally retire and you have experienced ANY of the following EVEN ONCE – where is my wallet? What did I do with my phone? Who didn’t hang up the car keys…oh, that was me…. You get the idea. Anyway – if you have critical information locked electronically – make sure that you have good old hard copy codes somewhere that doesn’t require a panicked memory to function. Especially if you use Apple products. jailbreaking them just isn’t going to be easy and not worth the effort compared to pulling out that weird notebook and looking something up.
I am off to spend time with the cat. Frankly, right now he is one of the more rational beings in my universe.
