I recently—as in a week ago—upgraded my cellphone from a six-year-old Blackberry Curve to an iPhone 7. Those of you who have a modern smartphone will (when you have finished having a chuckle over someone still owning, let alone using, a six-year-old Blackberry Curve in 2017) understand that this was a pretty dramatic upgrade, technologically speaking. For those of you who do not have smartphones, it would be like me going from driving my 2004 Kia Sorrento, which does not have any technological bells and whistles, to driving a 2017 model with more technology than Apollo 7.
The Blackberry was fine; it did what I needed it to do (send and receive phone calls and texts). But I needed a phone that was capable of taking video, for the purposes of my newspaper work, so the iPhone arrived, all bright and shiny and without any kind of operating manual whatsoever. I unpacked it gingerly, almost afraid to touch it. I had been told the phone would be activated already, so I assumed all would be plain sailing.
No. I needed to pop out a tray on the side and insert a “sim card”. Popping out the tray was no problem; but the sim card was far too big to put in it. “Google is your friend,” I muttered to myself, little realizing how many more times that day I would say that, and typed in “How to insert sim card in iPhone 7”.
All the results I could find told me I needed to download a template, and use it to help me cut around the card. The sim card was the size of a fingernail, so I was reluctant to do that; one slip of the scissors and my sim card would be useless.
So I called the place I ordered my phone from, and a very helpful man named Tom told me how to pop the card out from its surrounding cardboard without scissors. Then, seizing on the fact that Tom worked at the help desk and I needed help, I kept him on the line for another 10 minutes and had him walk me through such things as fingerprint ID and setting up a password.
Over the course of the next two days I learned how to (among other things) transfer photos to my phone to use as wallpaper; transfer music to it (it pleases me to know that wherever I am now, if my phone is with me I can listen to An Evening with Tom Lehrer); copy and paste links onto text messages; add contacts; download apps (hello, FlightRadar!); and of course take videos.
Which is why I found myself, under 34 C. skies on June 24, taking video of Ashcroft Manor to send to Black Press Digital for a Canada Day feature. It took me 20 minutes to shoot 47 seconds of video, thanks to the steady procession of traffic that drowned out my voiceover giving the history of the site; me fumbling said voiceover two or three times; and the woman who parked directly in front of the Garbage Gobbler, which I wanted to include (she kindly moved forward, when I could cross the highway to explain what I was trying to do).
Steven Spielberg has nothing to worry about, but I was pleased with the end result. So expect to see me out and about, filming, from here on in. And for those of you who duck away when you see me pull out my camera, be warned: I now have video. You can run, but you can’t hide.