Numbers

I got a new iPhone the other day. I’d been obsessed with getting the smallest one possible for years, to the point of buying a lot of used iPhones SE as insurance against their eventual unavailability. The Washington Post one time found me railing about the dearth of small smartphones on Twitter and featured me in an article as representative of the small-phone-loving faction ignored by Apple.

Then, early this year, I saw an iPhone Pro Max model in use and was sufficiently impressed by the camera to overcome the desire for overall smallness. I went maximal this time and bought a 15 Pro Max. It was a mild betrayal of the group I had stumbled into representing. No one cared, but maybe a revenge by someone is simmering out there somewhere. In any case, that is not the main topic here.

I backed up the previous phone as one does and thought I’d restored all the old phone numbers that were in it to the new phone, but some iCloud setting change (I think) resulted in the names of people not showing up when they call my new phone. Do not give me advice. I can restore things so the names do show up. I just haven’t. I may never do it. New phone who dis has a kind of attraction. I can be what I envision as adult and answer every call that comes in, and then save the names of people anew. Eventually I’ll be back to a normal library of acquaintances and people with whom I currently interact. Perhaps the biggest loss is the many numbers I had blocked for being salespeople or scammers.

If I continue this way, some numbers will never be restored. People I don’t interact with won’t ever call again to be saved. Some people I may eventually want to reach will be unreachable. That will ultimately be fine. Sometimes I even think of memorizing all the numbers that I care about and deleting every one from my phone. It’ll be like 1990, when a friend might call me at 748-6703 to play guns.

Most finally, the people in my old phone book who have died will never call again. My previous favorites ⭐︎ screen had accumulated a few people who had passed on. They were in favorites for various reasons: Frequency of interaction, family relationship, and so on. In a slightly sentimental act of omission I hadn’t deleted their numbers. Seeing their names every so often was a kind of memorial. Hundreds of years from now a historian might analyze, “In keeping their so-called number in his favorites screen, Derek paid the highest honor that could be given in the highly ritualized early Anthropocene culture.”

I don’t often open the favorites screen. Having small kids the same time as the advent of the iPhone meant that small kids were playing with my phone. After an awkward accidental call or two I got into the habit of keeping the phone app on the direct-number-dialing screen pictured above. This minimized risk—they might punch in and even initiate a call to a random set of numbers, but the chance of the set being valid was low. Favorites were one Umaibō-flavored finger from an annoying successful connection, so I avoided leaving that screen open.

Now the favorites screen is a near-empty room. It is a liminal space. There is only a short list of the precious few numbers I regularly use and care about, and even those are rarely dialed. LINE and Signal and other apps have replaced the phone. Mostly for good. It’s just a trivial thing that has changed but has the power to remind me of what keeps people in my memory. I am not wired to think about the people I do not regularly interact with. Simultaneously, I am wired to feel bad about this. Maybe that is why I’m fixated on writing letters when my brain will let me. The old modes of communication hold some kind of attraction to a person who is aware of their deficiency at maintaining ties.

Whatever reminds us of important things becomes also important, I guess. For a while, I am going to let my old favorites inhabitants fade.