This is a “Thank you!” to my children who have put up with lots of annoying emails and messages from me this week, and who continue to provide moral and practical support in my technological misadventures.

The backstory is that a few weeks ago, when I got new window blinds, the installer doubted whether my five-year-old Apple phone would be able to operate the remote controls. I was astounded. Really? Five years is too old? This thought was in the back of my mind when I read that a new Android phone had an excellent, possibly even the best, cell phone camera. This news triggered another of my personal soft spots, photography, and so I looked into it.

As it turned out, my cell phone service provider was offering a sale on this particular phone, and Bingo! we have a trifecta: feeling the need for a new phone, finding out one has a great camera, and learning that I could get a great deal. Yes, I was sucked right in.

I tried several times to buy the new phone online but for some mysterious reason I was unable to complete the process. The interwebs seemed to think I was still in Alberta when I and my phone were and are both in British Columbia. Eventually I connected with a human who completed the process for me. I never did find out why that problem arose.

When the new phone arrived, it did not come with a cable that I could plug into a regular power outlet, but in my collection of miscellaneous electrical gadgetry was a cable that would do the trick and which enabled me to charge it up. The new phone did, however, come with a gizmo that enabled me to connect with my old (a mere five years old!) phone and download all the essential data, photos, and most of my apps.

The next two days were spent updating the apps to recognize the new phone and figuring out which apps were not transferred, whether or not they matter, and whether or not I cared enough to do something about them.

Dominating all this activity, though, was the frustration I had with text messaging. As you are probably aware, messaging apps are all similarly named. On my new phone I had Messages with a blue logo, Messages with a green logo, and Messaging with a blue/red logo.

Messaging is the one that Facebook uses and which once caused me to miss a coffee meetup with an old friend because I didn’t have it on my phone. Now I have it, but have only used it twice in ten years.

The blue Messages is the one the new Android phone uses and the green Messages is the one Apple uses. Until now, I have mostly used the Apple messaging app which allowed me to communicate with both my children and everyone else on my contact list.

Once I switched to the Android phone, however, the green app got the hump (that’s British for resentfulness) and wouldn’t let me communicate with my eldest child. My youngest uses Apple computers and phones, but my eldest has an Android phone. I found that I could text them both from my Apple Macbook, but only my youngest when using the green Messages app on my new phone.

Accordingly, I switched to the blue Messages app, and found that I could communicate with both of my children from my new phone but then could not message my eldest from my laptop. My youngest explained that “The one from your laptop is coming from your email address. The one from your phone is coming from your phone number. So the phone is using sms text and the laptop is using apple’s iMessage system”. Gah!

I thought “I bet Google knows what to do,” and it did. It recommended an app called Spike which allows messages and emails from both Apple and Android phone and computers. After I downloaded Spike to my phone, I stopped using the green Messages app and returned to the blue Messages app.

Now, when I get a message from my eldest, I receive it twice! I have gone from not getting messages delivered to receiving them twice. I’ll take that as a win. All this winning required my children to put up with receiving multiple messages from me saying “Test” or “Testing” or “grumble grumble grumble”, all of which they responded to with remarkably good grace. Everyone should have children as obliging as mine.

Anyway, for better or worse, I am now using an Apple laptop and an Android phone. It’s a bit like trying to negotiate peace in the middle east, but it is possible and when it works it is great. We can all talk to each other.