Today the battery on my iPhone 6 Plus died. By that I mean it wouldn’t take a charge. I first noticed it during the Denver-to-Durango flight. I drove right over to a Durango cell phone repair store and bought a new battery, and then that one died. The newbie had a 48% charge when I bought it, and it went right down to less than 6% over the next 45 minutes despite constant charging. No Google Maps, no phone calls, no music…nothing. Right now the phone is sitting in a tech boutique called Hub Telluride, where they’ll be trying to fix it tomorrow morning. As a temp-save measure they put my SIM card into a $25-per-day iPhone 5 rental, but then they discovered that phone had been locked by a previous customer with “find my iPhone” software.
No iPhone in Telluride means no after-the-fact editing, not checking Twitter as much, less filing, a little behind the eight ball. Not good. If it’s truly, finally dead I can’t replace it until I’m in Manhattan on Tuesday evening or early Wednesday.
And then I temporarily lost my wallet during the drive from Durango to Telluride. I stopped at a small hotel in Dolores so I could use their wifi to make a couple of Skype calls with, and I left my wallet in the hotel lobby. I do dumb shit like this when I’m upset and distracted. I called the hotel when I got to Telluride and lo and behold they had it, cash and all. A three and 1/2 hour round trip (Telluride to Dolores and back) awaited that evening, and then I thought of Sasha Stone, who at the time was driving north in her SUV from Southern Colorado. I called and asked her to drop by the hotel (everyone drives by the Dolores Mountain Inn) and pick it up. And she did. Sasha!
But more grief was in store. The geniuses at Booking.com never sent me any instructions about how to get into the two-bedroom condo at 350 So. Mahoney, which I initially rented last March. I paid $1600 and change for this sucker, and when I got here there was no way to get in, and the Booking.com agents (who work out of China) didn’t have any good phone numbers for the condo owners. They actually sent me a letter late this afternoon stating that the owners don’t want to accommodate me and I’m out of luck. And then they tried to put me into a Red Lion hotel in Montrose, Colorado. This is what happens when your booking agent lives in Shanghai.
Producer Glenn Zoller, who has a home here, took pity and gave me a bed for tonight, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?
