There are days when technology reminds us that civilization is a fragile experiment.
Yesterday was one of those days.
My Samsung phone had become trapped in a security loop that seemed designed by a committee of prison wardens. Every incorrect password increased the waiting period before another attempt. At the current rate, I expected to regain access sometime around Christmas.
First I tried AT&T.
Then I tried a Costco wireless kiosk, which I eventually discovered was not really AT&T, but a private company selling AT&T services while wearing the costume of customer support.
Then I tried another repair place.
Nobody could fix it.
By this point, I was carrying four phones around Los Angeles and beginning to feel like a man transporting evidence from a crime scene.
Then I found Shawn at Image Wireless in Westwood.
Shawn looked at the phone and said he could probably fix it in a couple of hours without losing the data.
This was not what I expected to hear.
By then I had been told, directly and indirectly, that my choices were surrender, despair, or waiting until the holiday season to try another password.
But Shawn did exactly what he said he would do.
He recovered the phone.
He preserved the data.
He got all four phones running smoothly.
He also put a protective shield on my wife’s phone, which may have cost slightly less than a small used car, but by then I was too grateful and too exhausted to conduct a congressional investigation.
During the process, Shawn asked me what I did. I told him I was a writer. He mentioned that he had known Robert Towne, and suddenly we were no longer just customer and technician. We were two guys talking about movies, writing, old Hollywood, and the strange little connections that make Los Angeles interesting.
Then Shawn decided he could also connect my phone to my old Honda.
I told him that was not necessary.
Shawn disagreed.
There are people who provide customer service, and then there are people who declare war on unfinished business.
Shawn belongs to the second group.
By the end of the afternoon, my data was recovered, our phones were working, my wife’s phone had a new screen protector, and Shawn was trying to establish diplomatic relations between my Samsung and my Honda.
In an age of automated voices, outsourced confusion, and companies that make you feel as if you are being transferred from one machine to another until the sun burns out, there is something refreshing about a human being who looks at a problem and attacks it until it surrenders.
That is Shawn.
He may be slightly impossible.
But he fixed my phones.
