(Not Saying) "I told you so!"

Last Friday, I made the decision to buy a new iPhone. I did this for a couple of reasons: 1) though still functional, my old iPhone was cracked and couldn’t hold battery life for more than a couple of hours and 2) the camera on the iPhone 5 is leaps and bounds better than any other version. On Friday, we are leaving for our summer family vacation, so I thought it would be a super opportunity to use the new and improved iPhone as my primary camera. All makes sense, right? Too much sense, I’m afraid…

I told the HOTY (a/k/a Husband Of The Year) about my plan and he said, “I don’t know why you want to mess with your iPhone when your emails work perfectly and you have another camera that you can take on your trip. But if that’s what you want to do, then okay.”

So, Friday, I went to the Apple store and bought my new iPhone 5. I asked the (always brilliant!) Apple technicians to help me set up the new phone. It took quite some time to upload my hollye@thesilverpen.com email — so much time, in fact, that my technician became quite frustrated. The Silver Lining was that he was very determined and after about 45 minutes was finally able to download all of my emails. The big (HUGE!) mistake that I made was leaving the store before testing an outbound email.  Sure enough, when I got home, I couldn’t send an email….something about the “outgoing server” not working. I have not a clue in the world.

So, Friday night, I was on the phone with Apple, GoDaddy and AT&T support for 3 (yes 3!) hours with no success.  Saturday morning (beginning at 5:30 am), I was on the phone with all three companies for 5 (yes 5!) hours, also with no success. To add insult to this injury, without success, I had to get off the phone with everyone at 10:30 am because I was leaving town for 4 days.  Oh yes. I couldn’t make this up.

While on the phone (and vacillating between dropping f-bombs and tears tears), I kept asking myself: What is the Silver Lining? Where oh where or where the f-bomb is the Silver Lining? Ever since my pesky bout with breast cancer, I know without a doubt that Silver Lining(s) are indeed present. Sometimes I just have to look a little extra hard for them.

Lo and behold, I found several Silver Linings:

1. First and foremost, my family and I are healthy and happy. I could actually stop there, but there are more…
2. One of my emails still works so I’m semi-in communication….and
3.  The HOTY didn’t say “I told you so.”  He could have said it multiple times. Easily. I gave him plenty of opportunities. But he didn’t. How great is that?  It made me appreciate and love him even more (I didn’t know that was even possible).

The life lesson for me is is to focus with great intention on NOT saying, “I told you so” (to anyone, anytime). Saying “I told you so” adds an extra painful sting to an already stingy situation. It’s easy to say “I told you so”…natural almost.  It can be said in different ways, e.g., “Didn’t we talk about that?” or “I figured that would happen.”  However it is said, it boils down to the same thing: I.Told.You.So.

Though my email situation is still incredibly disabled, I am grateful to the HOTY for this life lesson. Sometimes we have to learn things the hard way, but hopefully this enables the lessons to really stick. I’ll add this as another Silver Lining.