Friday 04/28/2023
Took a shortish walk in the morning, ending with a cappuccino and almond croissant at Mme. Collette’s, for the first time in months.
Before lunch I spent almost two hours working with Bob’s iMac. Bob is a new resident and, just between you and me and the doorpost, he has lost some ground in the wits department. Bert has spent some time getting his TV working, which included calling in the professionals of our IT department. Bert doesn’t get along with Macs so when he saw Bob has an old iMac that Bob said “didn’t work”, he asked me to look.
Aside from its age — it’s a 2009 iMac, which is beyond geriatric in the computer world — its only real problem was that it was doing that annoying thing Macs do, demanding to be connected to iCloud. My heart sank. I have run into this so often around here. Somebody sets a person up with a nice Apple ID and all is well, then one day they reboot it or upgrade it or something, and it needs to be re-signed-in to iCloud and they have no fucking idea what their Apple ID is, or the matching password. In Bob’s case, he didn’t think he ever had an Apple ID.
Well he did, once, because it was asking for the password to go with the Apple ID for (his email at AOL.com). Which meant that resetting the password would involve getting a recovery email to him at AOL.com, so let’s get signed in there. The web browser thought it knew the AOL password but AOL didn’t agree. So now we do a password reset at AOL. Fine, but it wants to send a text to a phone number that “ends in **26” — which his current iPhone number does not end with. So he’s changed phones since the AOL account was created, but never updated the phone number in his profile. Well, it was probably set up in 2009. Probably by his late wife, or a younger relative.
I spent 45 minutes on the phone with AOL customer support but finally got his password reset, and logged in to AOL and reading email, yay. Now I could try to reset the Apple password, but by that time he had to leave for some appointment. I carried on until Apple wanted answers to his Security Questions. Name of your first pet? I gave up.
Later in the afternoon I printed out some nice flower pictures and changed out my photo exhibit. It was basketball action shots, now it’s big showy flowers.
Codgerville 