2020-09-22

things i will always be bad at

My new phone arrived in the mail today, which means that I now have to set it up. This is mostly a painless process, but there are a few annoying steps:

• Copying data from the micro sd card to some other device so that I can reformat it when putting it in my new phone. My phone(s) are the only things that have micro sd ports, so I have to figure out how to get the data on some other device e.g. by putting the phone into developer mode and copying data to my laptop using adb?
• The fiddly dance where I install WhatsApp on my new phone, verify my phone number, then realise that there is no message backlog, which requires me to verify my phone number on my old phone, back up my messages to the cloud, then enable WhatsApp on my new phone and download the backups.
• Recovering the passwords for apps where I never wrote down the password in an actual password manager.

The thing that all of the above activities have in common is that they involve me forgetting to do something in preparation, jumping into the phone setup process, then having to backtrack and figure the thing out the hard way.

I think that there are a number of tasks like this, where they involve some amount of knowledge and care, but nobody does them often enough to be any good at them. Unfortunately, a lot of these tasks are very important and can cause a lot of problems if we do not do them well. Here are some examples:

• Moving house
• Buying and selling property
• Breaking up with someone
• Divorce
• Going to university
• Taking exams
• Quitting your job
• Applying for jobs
• Having children
• Experiencing the death of a loved one

How do we get good at these things? The obvious answer is practice - but in a lot of these cases, it would be for the best if they happened as rarely as possible. Another approach is to instead become someone who is an expert at helping other people face these situations. Unfortunately, such people cannot be trusted to always represent their clients best interests. There has to be another way...