No Problem

I'm always shocked when I see a shattered screen. My reaction may be improbable, given the number of young people with devices I used to spend most of my time with. Even so, the response of the person with the damaged screen is usually inverse to my own.

Years ago, I read an essay by David Sedaris about a time when he tried to put an injured mouse he had captured in his country house out of its misery. When he looked down at it in the bucket where he was attempting to drown it, it was swimming lamely, but gamely, around, despite its injuries as if to say, "I can work with this!"

I often think of that mouse when I see the lengths people will go to to avoid having their screens repaired. "You can't use the right half of the keyboard," they might shrug, "just use Siri for those letters."

As a teacher, I would deliver the hard blow without hesitation. "Give me that!" I'd tell the student, "I'm going to put a ticket in to fix it." Soon enough, the sting of being without their device would be salved by a repaired screen at no cost to them.

Out in the world, I don't have that power, and so, as I stated at the top, I'm shocked by the number of folks who use their device with a damaged screen until, well, they can't anymore. "It's fine," they routinely tell me, adding that they either don't want to pay or be without it for the repair. 

Of course, there is also the phenomenon of creeping inoperability. A couple of weeks ago, Heidi tripped and landed on her phone. She wasn't hurt, but the screen did suffer some damage. "We should have that fixed," I suggested.

"It's fine," she assured me. "Everything works."

That's no longer true, although I will hand it to her—she has found many workarounds. "Let's get that fixed tomorrow," I said a little while ago as she was scrolling through her address book to find a contact whose name she couldn't type on the broken keyboard.

"Okay," she agreed, "but I think it's probably good for my brain to have to find new ways to keep everything working!"