Sunday Never Happened

Photo of a lime green and a bright magenta Post-It Notes pad on top of a Macbook keyboard.

Since I did throw some shade on my family members and their challenges with technology in last week’s post, I feel it’s only fair to own up to my own tech failings, which led to pretty much an entire day getting deleted.

I feel like everyone probably has a favorite phone app. It’s the app that you use more than any other and probably in more ways than it was ever intended simply because you like it so much. For me that app is Notes. It comes pre-loaded on iPhones, and I assume Android phones have something similar. As someone who spends entirely too much money on Post-It Notes it should probably come as no surprise that I am so devoted to my Notes app.

So, that’s why what happened early Sunday afternoon was so devastating for me. I am talking about accidentally erasing one of my notes, a note that I use EVERY SINGLE DAY. In a second of fat-fingered fumbling I wiped out the entire note. I don’t mean that I accidentally deleted it. Deleting it would have been fine. I could have gone into the trash and recovered it. Instead in some accidental combination of finger swipes that I will never be able to duplicate in a million years, I managed to paste over the entire contents of the note with the contents of my clipboard.

Even this wouldn’t have been the end of the world, if I had realized what I had done. Notes has an undo button at the top. Had I realized that I had stupidly pasted over my note, I could have hit that undo button and all would have been right with the world. Staring at this random bit of text where my big long note file should have been, I came to the erroneous conclusion that I had somehow closed out my note and opened up a different one. Determined to get back to my correct note, I closed out the note and went to the list of notes. Big mistake. By closing out the note, I had now made it so that there was now no chance to use that handy undo function.

As I stared, perplexed at my list of notes—it’s a long list—I couldn’t find the note I wanted anywhere. I searched, and got the worrying message that 0 results were found. Realization began to dawn on me. Followed by horror. Frantically I searched the internet for a way to recover my old note. There was lots of information about recovering deleted notes from the trash bin, but my particular goof was not as common, and not nearly as fixable.

Believe me, I tried. I spent way more time than I should have searching for some weird, magical workaround, but everywhere I kept getting the answer that the only way to resurrect my disappeared note was to employ the nuclear option: wipe out the entire contents of my phone, and restore it from a backup. Lucky for me, I had an iCloud backup from 1 a.m. that morning where my note was still intact.

Ron, asked me if I could recreate the contents of the note. I figured I probably could, more or less, but it would take a lot of work and a lot of time, and it might not be quite perfect. I considered this, but the task seemed daunting. I should mention that by this point we had spent a good chunk of our Thursday, our Friday and our Saturday next door getting the house next door cleaned up and ready for its new occupants. I had been looking forward to a mostly restful Sunday (well, except for the few more little things we finished up next door.) Did I have the energy to create my entire note from scratch? I did not.

Resetting seemed like the only viable option. I wiped out my entire phone and resurrected it with the 1 a.m. backup. Magically, my precious note was restored minus any changes I had made to it on Sunday, which was no big deal considering that one of those changes was pretty devastating. As far as my phone was concerned it was like Sunday never happened.

If by some chance you sent me a text message on Sunday afternoon, I apologize that it vanished into the ether. I also vanished the pictures that Ron had taken with my phone earlier of the house next door, because stupidly I didn’t think to text them to him before wiping out the phone. It’s not really a big deal because we can just go back there and take more photos.

Anyway, I’m so grateful for that backup that was able to restore my phone. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had such an option in real life? Like if we made some huge mistake, and just had a truly terrible day, we could press some button, and it would reset things to how they had been at one in the morning. I mean, obviously if every one had that option things would get dangerous very quickly. Come to think of it, that would make a great premise for a science fiction story. Be right back, I think I’ve got to go open up the Notes app and jot that down.

— Alissa