Every once in a while, I’ll have some thing that I’m doing where I can’t figure it out, but then it becomes A THING that I am convinced I can make work on my own. I call these situations “personal challenge” because I WILL CONQUER THE SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE. This happens from anything to riding a shuttle train at the airport that rocks all over the place, where I refuse to hold on to the railing and instead stand in the middle of the car and “surf” the motion without falling (so far with great success), to having something wrong with technology that I am determined to figure out without one of those “Genius Bar” people helping me. This was the case yesterday when I turned on my iPad for the first time in about 3 years.
After letting the thing charge for an hour because BOY, was that battery dead, I was able to turn on the power. I’ve never used this thing for much (as you can tell by the fact that it just sat for 3 years) but we’re going on a trip tomorrow and I wanted to rent some movies to put on it and have games to play. I noticed some old pictures in the photo section that I wanted to be sure to save (pictures of our pups and a bunch from when Wil and I went to Australia 3 years ago) so first, I connected it to my desktop to move the photos there in case something went horribly wrong and I accidentally deleted them. (Did I mention I’m not very good at the technologies? Because deleting something important is somehow one of my Super Powers.)
The first thing that popped up on the iPad after transferring the photos was to log in to iCloud. On my phone, desktop, and laptop, I had long ago changed the email associated with my iCloud account and updated the password. The email that kept popping up for iCloud on my iPad was an old Yahoo! account that I got rid of close to three years ago. This is where the problems started. I couldn’t remember the password so I couldn’t get into it to change the email or even sign out of iCloud. I couldn’t use the “I forgot my password” link because the options were to send it to the email it was associated with (according to my iPad, the old Yahoo! address) and when I tried to recover the password by answering the security questions which started with my birthdate, it kept telling me that wasn’t my birthday and it didn’t match their records, so no bueno. Not those exact words, but close. After multiple attempts to figure this out, I asked people on Twitter if they knew how to fix this. I had tons of suggestions but nothing was working. I even had someone who used to work at the Genius Bar at Apple try to walk me through accessing this without success. She sent me a link to steps you can take via changing the email address on FaceTime and the messages part which should then update it in iCloud. It allowed me to do this for the other two but wouldn’t do that for iCloud. ARGH!! I tried stupid things like turning it off and then back on again, and even blowing in the connector like an Atari cartridge to make it work. NOTHING. Wil tried to help me fix it and when that didn’t work, he Googled ways to do this, all still without success. And that’s when this became PERSONAL CHALLENGE.
I logged on to the iCloud website to manage my account. There, it showed that my home computers, my cell phone, and my iPad were all connected to my iCloud account. It also showed my correct email address and password. I tried changing my password in the hopes that it would update on all of the devices which worked for the others BUT NOT ON MY IPAD. On the site, it gives the option to remove a device, so I clicked on the iPad icon and it should have removed it from iCloud. According to the account on their site it was removed, but according to the iPad, it was still connected to it by my DAMN YAHOO! ACCOUNT. I even did the “restore/recovery” thing which basically is like a force quit when your device is being funky. I did that THREE times while it was connected to my desktop, as I was instructed to do. NOTHING. It was restored (as in reset) but it still had the same old Yahoo! account attached to it. After three hours of dealing with this thing without success (and nearly wanting to drop kick it into a fire pit) I walked away from it, accepting defeat on my personal challenge, with the plan to take it to the goddamn “Genius Bar” at Apple so they could do one tiny thing and proclaim “Fixed!” while I stand there and scowl at my iPad, which is surely laughing at my failure.
With all the suggestions being sent to me, somehow at least one of them had to work. I had tried them all individually without success. I was taking a shower when I thought “maybe a combination of all of these suggestions being done at the same time is the solution.” I jumped out of the shower, raced into my office, turned off the power on my iPad (which I had already done multiple times) and connected the iPad to my desktop again while holding down the “home” button on the iPad (which, like I said, had been working like a force quit restore option the last 3 times I did this.) While still holding that button down, I logged onto the iCloud site on my desktop. There, for whatever reason, it again showed my iPad attached to my account so I deleted it yet another time but this time, it allowed me to go through steps to wipe out the entire iPad and start new. YAAASSSSS. I don’t know why it wasn’t allowing me to do that before and just kept treating it like it was restoring everything while keeping all of my info and apps, but this time it worked!
I get that these things are in place for security reasons and that one of the ways to maintain the security is that connecting the iPad to my computer told it that it was my device. The only thing I could think was maybe because it sat for so long, it was just a little slow to catch up to what I was trying to do with it. Whatever the reason, I got it to do what I wanted it to do, and that felt pretty damn good.
PERSONAL CHALLENGE: COMPLETE.