As late as noon on Thursday, nothing foretold disaster. But at 4:00 p.m. the first warning bell rang from an unknown number:
— Hey, so are you coming tomorrow?
After a couple seconds of thinking, from the voice and the question I figured out who was calling.
— Yes, of course I’m coming, as usual. Did you change your number or something?
— No.
— Weird, it didn’t show up for me.
The second warning bell rang later, a few hours after that, when in “Viber” instead of first and last names it was just showing phone numbers.
No need to go ask Steve Jobs here — my phone book had crapped out.
649 contacts that had been accumulated over 10 years, the phone numbers of people I had called or who had called me at least once — all vanished in some unknown direction. And then an even sadder fact was confirmed: it wasn’t just the contacts that were gone, but all the data tied to iCloud — Apple’s cloud platform. For example, this is what the list of notes looks like, where I collect various thoughts, ideas, and useful links:
The calendar was empty too. The to-do list was virginally clean.
I got curious how many phone numbers I remembered even without the address book. I counted five, three of which turned out to be useless: my work phone, the phone at the department, and the MKS phone number.
Then another thought came to mind: maybe I shouldn’t bother restoring the phone book? Maybe I don’t need those 649 numbers? Who are all these people? Maybe whoever needs me will call or send a text themselves?
The last thought was that I actually don’t care how many numbers are in the phone book: well, zero is zero.
And in the evening I rebooted the phone, it huffed and puffed for a minute, downloaded all the data from the cloud, and everything fell back into place.