Last week my phone up and died on me. It was pretty old — at least according to current standards. It was an iPhone 6 that I’d been using for the past 3 years. And I’d been noticing the battery was not staying charged anymore.

Then one day — kaplooey — it just wouldn’t start up at all.

Luckily, I’d been pretty diligent with keeping it backed up to the Cloud, so didn’t lose all of my files, photos or videos. And even luckier, we happened to have another phone laying around the house. My partner had an old 6 plus that he used before upgrading to the X. So I was able to have everything transferred to that device, and get it activated.

However I did go 3 entire days with no phone whatsoever — Which wasn’t actually as catastrophic as one might think. Then again, I do work entirely from home, so it’s pretty easy for people to get in touch with me. If I had a job that required a fair amount of travel, I’d want to have a phone handy.

But had my phone lived for a few months longer, I most likely was going to upgrade anyway. And definitely would have looked into a way to trade in the older model for some sort of compensation. So the following article is something I’d like to keep in my back pocket, for future reference.

A Blast From the Past

A lot of exciting things happened back in 1995. Michael Jordan came out of retirement. TLC released their classic hit “Waterfalls”. “Forrest Gump” won the Oscar for Best Picture. The George Foreman grill was introduced.

And things also happened on a more personal level —

I got my first tattoo. It was a single red rose on my right ankle. Which may seem a bit too trendy, until you note the symbolism — since my last name is Rose.

I started my first “real” job, working part-time and summers at The Disney-MGM Studios (now known as Disney’s Hollywood Studios).

My second son was born (although I didn’t meet him until 4 years later). No, I’m not his birth mother. But I raised him, she didn’t, and therefore he is my son.

But in addition to all of that, a website called AuctionWeb launched on some crazy platform called the Internet. Little did anyone know what kind of impact that would have on our future.

You see, when I was in college, the ‘net wasn’t yet a common thing. Nobody had tablets, laptops or personal computers.

Although when I was a junior, I did convince my dad to let me bring our home computer onto campus, complete with dot matrix printer. Which made for some fun times when printing out a research paper at 3am in the sorority house. (Those suckers were LOUD!)

And while I don’t quite remember what type of PC we had back then, I do recall it ran MS-DOS, and all of my papers were lovingly & painfully written in WordPerfect.

My, how times have changed…