Last Week, This Week: Connection Issues, April 12-18

We can be connected to others in many ways. Whether it’s by blood, by friendship, or by account, issues with these connections often range from easy fixes to time-consuming solutions. Picking up where last week’s LWTW post left off, the inspiration for the title of this post came to me on Wednesday. I’ll share more on that later

This series, Last Week This Week, started as a Monday thru Friday look back at what I’d worn to work in the past week. With that part of my life soon ending, these posts have expanded to a full Sunday thru Saturday chronically, something like a diary. As such, for each day there is a brief description of my outfit or the photo as well as a detail or two about what happened.

Just as important are the connections we have with ourselves, whether related to mental well-being or physical health.  Even the strongest of connections can be fragile.

Sunday

A good part of the day was spent updating several online accounts and updating email subscriptions.  I’d already accounted for the loss of my work email account by saving and importing that contact list into one associated with a personal account.  Even though I had a work-issued iPhone, I had also used my personal iPhone to view my work email, calendar, contacts, etc.  As such, I have two Apple accounts and I’ve recently established a new personal email address.  It’s been an effort to figure out what apps and such were associated with which of my old accounts.  All of this account updating may be an on-going activity for a while.

Meanwhile, another huge project that’s been waiting for me to tackle is my not yet listed Poshmark inventory. I’m great at sourcing items to sell but not so good at getting the items listed. This rack of clothing shows some of the items recently culled from my wardrobe that will soon be posted.  No OOTD photo because I spent the day in workout clothes.

Monday

The first Monday that I don’t need to dress for work so I opted for jeans.  More time spent updating online accounts.  While my staff had been WFH (and they still are), each was to submit a brief daily work description which in turn would be compiled into an office-wide log.  One of the team members had been tasked to send out a daily text and an email reminder to the group.  I’d been wondering if he would remember to start a new text group or continue to use the old one.  Sure enough, at the prescribed time that mid-afternoon, I got the group text reminder to submit my daily work description.  I didn’t respond but I was kind of glad that that connection had not yet been lost.  And as you can see from my OOTD photos, I’m still trying out different daily selfie locations.

Tuesday

The weather had warmed up a bit so The Husband readily agreed to my idea of sitting out on the beach for a while. A year and a half ago when we first hatched our “let’s buy our retirement home now” plan, we knew it was a risk and wondered if we’d be better off waiting. Last Tuesday, sitting on the beach, we knew we’d made the right choice at the right time.  The photo above is better than any OOTD selfie.  There was no group text in the afternoon so a new group without me must have been started.

Wednesday

An important task to complete this day was taking photos for the upcoming Saturday post.  The outfit below is the one shared in Reclaim-Recycle-Reuse: Bold Choices.  I had spied this little corner in our spare bedroom so I thought to try it out as a selfie location.  Later in the afternoon, a message inadvertently came through on the original group text from “TS” (name disguised for privacy) asking if anyone else was having connection issues logging into their work account.  Before reporting the problem to the office IT group, she wanted to know if it was she alone having a problem or if others were as well.  This time I decided to have a little fun and sent the Tuesday sailboat photo to the group along with “my connection issues.  Sorry, not sorry 🤣”.

Thursday

Sometime during dinner that evening, I distinctly recall saying “is today really only Thursday?”. I’ve begun to realize that without my former daily structure of meetings, time has a tendency of getting away from me.

Friday

As I write this post, I cannot recall anything specific about what I did on Friday. All I know is that I wore workout clothes all day (but didn’t do any exercising) so no OOTD photo.

Saturday

More or less that same as Friday except for a new revelation. The Husband texted that he had tried calling me twice and both calls had gone directly to voicemail. This was odd because we typically do not have signal problems at our place. Then I remembered that our son had told me the same had happened to him a couple of days earlier. It also occurred to me that my phone hadn’t rung at all in at least a few days, no telemarketers or robocalls either.

We have a family account and everyone else’s phones were okay so it likely wasn’t an issue with service. I asked our daughter to try to call me and her call also went to voicemail. I could make outgoing calls, as well as send/receive texts, so it was a mystery as to why all incoming calls were going directly to voicemail. A couple of months ago I had activated the “silence unknown callers” feature which sends calls from unknown numbers (those not on your contact list) to voicemail but you still see those calls on your Recents list. And it works! It’d been so nice to no longer be bothered by those unwanted calls. But could that be why I was now having issues?

When I checked my Recents list I found that I hadn’t received a call in over a week, since April 10 to be exact. One thought I had was that with the account updating, perhaps my phone wasn’t recognizing numbers that were in my contact list. But if that was the case, those calls would still get reported on my Recents list which was not happening. So when in doubt, google. Early in my search, I stumbled on a reference to using *73 to end call forwarding. Ding ding, a bell went off in my head. In all the updating activities, I must have inadvertently hit one of my “Favorites” that I had set up to forward calls to my work cell phone. Since I’ve turned that phone off, the calls were then just going directly to voicemail. A quick *73 to stop the forwarding and all is now well with my phone.

That experience seemed to be a fitting end to a week of connection issues. Technology aside, the COVID pandemic has disrupted many of our normal connections. My experiences of the past week are hardly fair comparisons to what others are going through. For nearly all of us, the magnitude and impact of the changes in their lives have been difficult to imagine and anticipate. If only the solution was as easy as *73.

Be well and let’s connect! Subscribe, tweet, follow, friend, love, pin … all options are available and waiting for you. I look forward to hearing from you.

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