Week in review: 28 November - 4 December 2016

This week didn’t turn out too well, but I’ve started to blame it all on 2016. So it’s fine. We’ll part in less than four weeks anyways. On Friday evening I was totally ready to relax and enjoy the weekend. I even took a walk outside, and then the unthinkable happened: I let my smartphone slip. It fell on some soil, but I immediately saw the damage. It didn’t work anymore. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I mean my phone sometimes falls to the ground – more often than not because the cat pushes it -, but it never broke. It didn’t even get any scratch. This time though it broke despite a case and a protection foil. I went home and shed bitter tears. And cursed the year. Because why not. I have had that phone for one and a half years (it’s a Galaxy S5) and if I had been planning to buy a new one, I would have done so last week during the Black Friday sales. But I wasn’t ready for a new smartphone, and to be honest my bank account isn’t either. My first idea was to use my old Galaxy S2, but I learned that US SIM cards are much smaller than European ones.

I spent Friday evening in a quite miserably state at home. It isn’t even that I couldn’t spend a few days without a phone, but more the fact that I didn’t expect to break something as valuable as this. At least on Saturday morning I got the idea that maybe only the display was broken. After consulting Google, I went to the closest display repair shop – and indeed they were able to exchange it. For $ 200. Ouch! This is how you throw money down the drain. But repairing was still way cheaper than a new phone. And it made me very happy to be able to use all my apps again, from banking to controlling Alexa and of course communicating with all my friends via Whatsapp. Since the display was about one third of a new Galaxy phone, I have decided that I’m going to keep mine for at least another year (please be good, 2017!) and I try to never drop it again.