Stop me if you’ve done this before.
You plug your iPhone into your computer. You click the sync button. You leave the phone to sync. You come back later to see if the sync is complete. It is. You unplug your phone. You open the contacts on your computer. THEY’RE ALL GONE!!!
How To Make Me Cry
I keep all of my voice over clients in my address book on my laptop. All of their names, email addresses, phone numbers and mailing addresses. Information I’ve gleaned from email signatures, contracts, non disclosure agreements and company websites, to name a few.
This information comes in handy for sending out postcards or, in a case like today, writing Christmas cards for all my clients from 2013.
Here’s the problem, when I went to start addressing all of those Christmas cards, all of my mailing addresses were gone from my contacts list.
That’s when I nearly started to cry.
Syncing Mistakes 101
It would seem the last time I set my iPhone to sync with iTunes on my Macbook, I had the setting checked to have the iPhone contacts overwrite the computer contacts. How I did this, why I did this… I’ll never know. But trust me, I’ll spend a few sleepless nights thinking about it!
What should have been a festive few hours writing out Christmas cards turned into an all afternoon and all night long affair, just to finish around 30 of them!!! Yes… 30! Because instead of grabbing the mailing info from my contacts, I had to find every last mailing address for every last client ALL OVER AGAIN!
You Can’t Fix Stupid
This would normally be the sort of story I’d never share because, let’s be honest, it’s pretty humiliating. An honest enough mistake, sure. But humiliating none the less.
After I got over my overwhelming desire to curl up in the fetal position and cry, I could only laugh instead. I mean, it’s pretty funny when you think about it. Or at least, it might be funny if it happened to someone else!!!
That’s why I share.
So you can laugh.
And check your sync settings!!!
