Re: Ghosts in my phone
Fri 31 July 2026
Earlier today, I put out a call to see if anyone wanted to do a July Reply collab, and Hyde answered that call!
In his post Hyde talks about doing "spring cleaning" on his phone, removing old photos and contacts.
I have a similar routine, removing a year's worth of photos and videos from my phone at the start of every year, so I never have more than about 23 months worth of photos/videos in my phone's gallery. This January, I changed my routine a little. Instead of clearing out (it's all backed up elsewhere, obviously) everything older than January 2025, I removed everything older than January 2026.
I lost some people who were very dear to me late last year, and having photos of them in the last months of their lives on my phone was a little too difficult, so I removed them and manually loaded a handful of favorites, older photos from happier times.
I've also thought of purging contacts from my phone, as I still have contacts from people I met once a decade and a half ago. My rationale for not cleaning those up is that I want to know who's calling me in case they call, if that makes any sense? (probably not 😂)
So, I haven't had the guts to clean up my contacts, and dang, I have nearly a thousand of them.
I also have ghosts in my contacts. Several friends that have passed on, some years prior. I'm reminded of the line form the Men at Work song, Overkill,
"Ghosts appear and fade away"
I was just reading through some texts I had from my mom circa 2019-2021 that I had saved as a PDF years ago. It warmed my heart to see her nearly daily messages of love, inquiring of how I was doing, and it broke my heart to see the frequency of the messages slowly drop off as her vision deteriorated to the point that she could no longer really use her phone.
I also remember the outgoing voicemail message that she had in her inbox for many years, both very sweet and very professional. I remember the lilt and music in her voice.
I wanted to save the message, so I tried calling a family member's phone, starting a recording, and trying to call her phone from that second line to make a recording of the outgoing message, but it didn't work. I was then going to just record the call acoustically, but then I thought I'd call AT&T and have them grab the message directly and email it to me. The person on the phone was absolutely no help, and was just giving me instructions for how to save an incoming voicemail. As I was trying to futz with the settings on her phone to try to figure out a way to save the outgoing message, I tapped on a setting which without any warning deleted her message.
Bastards.
I then called the technical support line, and they were of no help.
Then, I switched our two remaining phone lines to a very cheap MVNO and stopped paying AT&T's ridiculous ~$230 per month rate four our four phone lines. I didn't even feel like explaining why they were losing a long-standing business customer. I was done.
I had a few voicemails from her left on my google voice account, and I managed to save all of those. I thought I had saved more of her voicemails that were on my own phone, but most of them were gone when I went to look.
Oh, the joys of the vapid, ephemeral (mis)information age.
So, those are the ghosts on my phone. I don't have all of the records of their lives that I wish I had, but I have indelible imprints on my mind. My mother's sweet demeanor, my grandmother's blazing smile of recognition every time she saw me, even when she was in the deepest depths of stroke-induced dementia.
Category: Life
Tags:
Beauty
Collaborations
Life
Loss
Non-religious post
Non-technical post
Personal favorites
Polemic
Prose
