It started Tuesday, just as I was about to drive home from work. Apple CarPlay wouldn’t connect. My car is a 2018, and I use an adapter to make CarPlay wireless. It can be a little wonky, so I unplugged it, plugged it back in, tried restarting my phone. Nothing. I finally played my audiobook through Bluetooth and drove home.
A reasonable person might have left it there for the night. I went straight to Google and spent two hours troubleshooting in my garage.
By bedtime, I was still thinking about it. I grabbed the bedroom TV remote yes, there’s a TV in the bedroom, I know, sleep experts everywhere are shaking their heads and pressed the button. The TV wouldn’t come on. I tried the other remote and got a screen asking me to log back into everything with a QR code or a password.
Absolutely not. I had reached my troubleshooting limit. I put in my earplugs and went to bed. (The earplugs are because my Frenchie sleeps beside me. If you’ve heard a Frenchie sleep, you understand.)
I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep. Naturally.
I go into the office three days a week, and Thursday wasn’t technically one of them, but skipping it meant a mandatory Friday instead, and Thursdays are usually quiet. So in I went anyway.
I booted up my computer. No internet. Which meant I couldn’t connect to GlobalProtect. I asked a couple of other people if they were having trouble. Nope. Just me. So “I restarted the computer I had just started”
That was number three. At this point I was beginning to wonder if I was the problem. Not in an emotional growth kind of way. In an am I interfering with electrical signals? kind of way.
Apparently three glitches in two days wasn’t enough to make me leave the car alone. That night, I spent another hour in the garage trying to get CarPlay working. Still no luck. I went to bed hoping that, at the very least, everything would stay quiet until morning.
Then, at 2:20 a.m. the fire alarm went off and scared the living hell out of me. It announced a problem in the “Family Room.” Except I didn’t have anything called Family Room in the app. Now I was awake, startled, and trying to solve a mystery in a room that apparently only the smoke detector knew existed.
It turns out the detector can have one name in the app and a different name that it says out loud. “Family Room” was its default callout name. I still don’t know what set it off possibly dust but at least I know which room it was talking about. At 2:20 a.m., that information would have been helpful.
And the car? After all the adapter troubleshooting, the problem appears to have been the cable. It could charge, but it wasn’t transmitting data. I got a new cable, and CarPlay came back.
Which means the actual culprits were: one bad cable, one confused smoke detector, one TV demanding my life story, and absolutely nothing to do with my personal electromagnetic field. Disappointing, honestly. For a few days there, I almost thought the universe was trying to tell me something.
Yogi Tea says: Not every signal is a sign. But every sign is also, technically, a signal.