My phone alerted me today that it has a firmware update available for download, so I dutifully grabbed the nearest USB cable and plugged it into the computer. It’s supposed to take 5 minutes.

An hour later and I’m still here. The phone is stuck in recovery mode, and I can’t bring it back to life. After 15 minutes more trial and error, I try a different USB cable. It’s now – finally – in the process of taking me back to where I started from. Hopefully I can bring the phone back to life, although I may have killed it forever (we’ll see).

Turns out the USB cable Flo bought at the dollar store might be fine for a bit of light charging, but is probably not good enough for software updates.

Lesson learned.