The past four evenings were a little tough for me. On Halloween night, right as I left work my iPhone 5S inexplicitly stopped working. In the top left hand corner of my phone the usually trusty AT&T logo was swapped out with the word “searching.” It was impossible to make a call. Sending any type of text was out of the question. If I wasn’t in a wifi supported area, I couldn’t do a darn thing on my phone. What was going on?

On my way home from work I did all the little tricks I could think of to get my phone functioning. When I arrived to my apartment and I still had a malfunctioning phone I busted out my laptop and started looking at Apple pages and internet forums for possible answers to resurrecting my device. Nothing worked. Of all nights for my phone to take a nosedive, did it really have to be Halloween? So much for receiving photos of my niece dressed in her costume, tough luck on getting trick-or-treater updates from my mom (I now know they had 259 total children come to their door), and forget about sending out any photos of Sidney and I in our costumes. But the bitterest pill to swallow was not sending out my holiday message. A streak was broken and that hurt.

The next few days sent me on a wild goose chase to fix my phone. No need to list all the places I stopped at and the numerous people I spoke with because the list is long. While everyone tried their absolute best, no one had an answer except that I had a faulty phone. In perhaps the lowest moment, an attempt last night to completely wipe out and restore my device completely backfired when we went to activate my phone it just wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t get past the activation screen, thus making my phone 100% useless in every way, shape, and form.

This morning I was given a loaner phone until Apple sends me a brand new device. After 84 hours of not being able to connect on a social, voice, and text level, it was so nice to be up and running.

The story ends happily! i now have a phone.

I know many of you might consider me a materialistic phone-dependent jerk, but take into consideration what I do. As a guy who works in social media, my iPhone is my livelihood. Think about a chef for a second. If you took away his oven, he could still manage to get the job done and serve food using alternative means but it would severely cripple him. The same goes for me with my iPhone. It depleted a lot of the tools I have at my disposal but because of some creativity and my great intern we made it through.

Of course there is the personal aspect of it as well. Not having the option to communicate with others sucks. The thought of getting in an accident or experiencing an emergency while phoneless also plays with your brain a bit. It was because of this reason combined with not having phone navigation that I made the easy decision not to venture anywhere unnecessary over the last several days.

However, I can now put my professional concerns and personal fears behind me. I presently have a functioning phone and soon I will have a brand new device. I want to thank Samantha Cherry from HTC for providing me with some great help and customer service over the past couple days. My dear friends, please never take your phones for granted, you never know when the power it gives you could be suddenly shut off. Don’t Blink.