It’s been a long time since I wrote one of those “guess what happened to me” post. So this one is long overdue.
About two weeks ago, while attending a graduation dinner for my grandson, I got into a discussion with him about his phone. He complained that he was running out of space on his phone and needed to add external storage. After researching what type of sd-card his phone took, I offered to buy the appropriate micro sd-card for him from Amazon. His new micro sd-card arrived a day later and he was a happy camper.
Now, I told you that story to tell you this one. After seeing how inexpensive the card was (128GB for $20), I decided to buy one for my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S9. When the memory card arrived, I took my S9 out of its protective Otterbox Defender case. It took about 10 seconds out of the case before the back of the phone started to separate from the front (as shown below).
We’ll skip forward in this tale about five minutes to avoid repeating all the profanity I uttered when I saw the phone. I’m guessing that it was the strength of the Otterbox case that kept the phone from splitting in half earlier. Anyway, I forced the phone back into the case and because I had insurance on the phone, I called my carrier (AT&T) and filed a claim. This was on a Thursday afternoon. AT&T passed me on to Asurion who handled the claim and put a replacement phone in my hands the next day (Friday) via FedEx.
Transferring data from my old phone to the new one took longer than it should have because the new phone didn’t have enough charge to handle a data transfer. So it had to be charged for about an hour before I could begin the transfer. However, once the new phone charged the data transfer was extremely easy using the Samsung Smart Switch app. Within 20 minutes the new phone looked and functioned just like the old phone. Except…some AT&T apps (Wi-Fi calling, HD Voice and Call Protect) didn’t work any more.
I called AT&T that night thinking that this was a function that they had to turn on. After 20 minutes on the phone with a really great customer services representative, he determined that while I had a Samsung Galaxy S9, I did not have an AT&T branded phone. The AT&T rep called Asurion directly with me on the line and Asurion promised me a new replacement phone. They also promised that the new phone would be charged enough out of the box so that the data transfer could occur immediately.
To their credit, Asurion delivered a charged AT&T branded phone the next business day. Samsung’s Smart Switch cloned the phone in less than 15 minutes. I spent the next three hours signing back into accounts on the new phone while it continued to update apps in the background. The bottom line is that I’m functional again with 128 GB of external storage.
Cost of this endeavor? $100 insurance deductible, 2 days of efforts remembering passwords and logging back into accounts and a week of worrying about what could have happened had I not opened the phone case when I did. I was fortunate that it did not end in a catastrophic event. To that end, I will now make a point of inspecting the phone out of the case weekly.
Wow unc. That was a good read.
Thanks and thanks for reading…