By Toh Hsien Min

One night in October I had trouble charging my ancient 2017-era Galaxy S8 in the evening, so left it to charge overnight; when I woke in the morning and it was still just at 70% I knew there was trouble.  So before my Saturday coffee I went to Sim Lim to look for a cable; if nothing else I could eliminate one variable.  A chap at a second-floor shop there was very helpful, he let me test the cable, then looked at the phone and diagnosed it as the charging port starting to fail.  I pretty much made my mind up at once, or maybe more accurately that made my mind up for me, since there was no way I would risk having a non-charging phone in wherever I ended up travelling to in November.  After coffee I walked round to Funan, and at the Singtel vendor there bought a new S25.  The guy there (named David, who I had chatted with before) was very good - once I said I was super nervous about transferring all my data from one phone to the other he pretty much did everything for me by connecting the two phones on the shop wifi, leaving me with instructions for swapping out the SIM card later in the day (after Singtel had shut down the old one and activated the new one).  It all took just 80 minutes, start to finish, and there I was with a new functioning phone.  I had thought I would have needed the entire afternoon trying to figure it out on my own.  

Of course the challenge then became dealing with all the small configuration details arising from how things had moved on since 2017.  I found that I couldn't quite get started reading my main email account on the new phone yet, because I didn't seem to quite remember my password (fortunately I remembered how to reset my password).  The next morning, the phone woke me with an unfamiliar ringtone of xylophones.  It turned out Android by default cannot now play WMA files, which was what my old alarm sound was on; so the options were to download a specialist app or convert the old file to MPEG (WMA to MP3 converter).  Similarly, I couldn't read Microsoft files as I used to be able to do; it seemed that the new phone needed a new download of an app with a Microsoft sign-in model.  It took me a while to figure out how to give Google maps permission to get my location data so that it could show me where I was.How to connect into the phone to retrieve files, encouragingly, didn't take any time at all, but then I realised the interruption in the transfer in the shop left me with double copies of photographs and I had to figure out which ones were connected to my actual WhatsApp.  My stupid bank's mobile app stopped working, and then when I reset it it screwed up my regular online banking also so that I couldn't get into my bank account at all.  Oh for the days of passbook banking.  I had to go down to the branch to get it sorted out, in the process of which replicating the same issue (because I hadn't downloaded the SingPass app yet, that crashed the installation and froze the account (would have been useful, guys, to have said you needed that to be in place before starting the account setup... or else do some user testing before releasing your app into the wild).  Unlike my old phone which blinks with a small discreet light when I receive a message, this one doesn't.  Or at least, I still haven't figured out if it's even meant to.  Which might not be a bad thing; it means I'll just respond less quickly to messages and get less distracted during my workday.

Which got me into a spot of nostalgia for the world back in the nineties when things were so much simpler, when changing your phone meant having a smaller, lighter thing in your pocket, one didn't worry about getting to the bus stop exactly on time to catch the service 131 because waiting's just a fact of life, and during the commute no one would broadcast ethnic pop music as if fellow passengers were starved of entertainment.  But then of course a few weeks go by and I start to get a little more used to the new phone and its idiosyncrasies, and begin to be able to tailor it a little more to my needs.

And then Microsoft stops support for Windows 10 and pushes us all to Windows 11 and the cycle begins all over again.  (Spoiler: Windows 11 sucks.)

This quarter's issue proved to be a very trying one to put together, because of a sort of quadruple witching, involving too much happening at work, the stress of planning for multiple trips, some personal challenges such as the unexpected issue with the phone, and then obviously the actual putting together of the issue itself.  At least, it's turned out to be a beautifully proportioned issue, with eight poems following a narrow path along a plateau, four short stories, four reviews, two essays and two interviews: almost like symmetric funnel.  All along the way, I found myself pausing by moments of beauty like the sun peeking through clouds, which unfortunately also lengthened the preparation of the issue.  At least that's some encouragement that the angst of this issue might be worth it. 

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