☎️ 😱 Living dangerously for seven years with a corporate phone

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

For seven years now, I’ve been living dangerously by only using my corporate phone for everything. I knew this was wrong, yet couldn’t resist, until this week.

There were only two, day-to-day negative impacts of relying on a corporate phone.

The first, admittedly minor, though surprisingly annoying, one is that any explicit songs in Apple Music were blocked. It isn’t that I feel compelled to listen to explicit lyrics. Rather, there are lots of good songs with a few swear words thrown in, especially for the more high-energy rock I prefer for workouts. Sometimes clean versions are available, though they lack the power of the real versions.

The second, more systematic, one is that iCloud Drive support was blocked. This disabled some important features of many of my favourite apps, like Drafts, Mindnode, Soulver, MusicBox, and Albums. These apps became little islands of inaccessible data that didn’t share with my iPad or Mac, limiting their utility.

Of course the real reason this was a bad idea is exactly what IT says: you shouldn’t mix work with personal. IT has been (appropriately) locking down more and more of the phone, while also adding in VPN and other monitoring apps.

So, why did I do it? Two main reasons: I really don’t like carrying extra stuff and I saved the monthly cost of a personal data plan (given Canada’s rates, this is bigger than you might think).

There was no epiphany that led me to finally get a personal phone. Just a steady realization that meant it was time.

I picked up an iPhone 13 mini. I have no need for the latest phone and really appreciate the smaller size of the mini.

I opted for a Freedom Mobile plan and added in the Apple Watch plan (something I couldn’t do with the corporate phone). My biggest surprise so far is how nice it is to have the Apple Watch Ultra connected via cellular and leave the phone behind. The Apple Watch really is quite functional for my needs without the phone.

Better late than never to this. I’m glad to finally have made the right choice and am enjoying better partitioning of work from the rest of my activities.