Hip to the Lingo: Jawbone UP App Asks for My Address

For the last three days, my Jawbone has not worked right. I wear it on my right wrist at night and it monitors my sleep. I press a button to activate it when I hop into bed, then press it again to turn it off in the morning. It tells me when I dozed off, when I woke up, when I got deep sleep, when I got just light sleep, and it shows it all to me, along with statistics and percentages, on a bar graph on my cellphone. Or it’s supposed to.

Three days ago, it stopped giving me information. I tapped its button. If you press it for half a second, it flashes a moon shaped light if in night mode, or a sun shaped light if in day mode. If it’s in one mode but you want the other, you just press it a little harder. The moon and sun were working perfectly. Which also told me the battery was not dead.

I checked the Bluetooth connection by tapping the Jawbone icon on my phone. That put up a plus. So the Bluetooth was coming and going okay. But it still wasn’t displaying.

I messed around trying to make it work for 30 seconds, which caused it to give off a message on the phone reading “for some reason, your data did not get posted, but you can enter it manually. Tap the (+) on the upper right to do that.” I did that. But all it asked for was the time I went to bed and the time I woke up. I could do that by twirling a timing wheel to move my START to the right time, and then by twirling another timing wheel to move my STOP time. So I did that and got another message. It seemed to refer to the AM and PM I had entered.

“You can’t start sleep after you woke up,” it said.

And at that point, I picked up the phone and called a Jawbone lady technician in Alabama.

After I told her what was going on, she said it was not the hardware but the software. I needed to re-install the app on my phone. There had been an upgrade.

“Some of my clients are having the problem you are having with the upgrade,” she said. “That could be it.”

She offered to walk me through it. But I know how to delete apps on the cell phone. You hold them down with your index finger until they begin to wiggle like a bug. When they do that, they display a big X in the upper left corner. You tap that and the app stops wiggling and then it vanishes. And you can get a new app in the app store. Just type in Jawbone. It’s called UP.

“There’s a dark blue one and there’s a light blue one,” Alabama told me. “Is your bracelet the one with the wiggly lines on it?”

I told her it was.

“Then download the light blue app. The other is for a different bracelet.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We have to hang up this call for you to do this.”

“I know.”

“I can give you a call back in fifteen minutes if you want,” she said. “See if it fixes it or not.”

“That would be nice of you,” I said. “I didn’t know they allowed you to do that.”

“Well they do. Just give me your name and address for my records. I have your phone number. It came up when you called.”

I gave her my name. Then I gave her my address.

“28 Three Mile Harbor Hog Creek Road, East Hampton, NY.”

“No, your address.”

“28 Three Mile Harbor Hog Creek Road, East Hampton, NY.”

“No, I mean your address.”

“Oh. THAT address. dan@danspapers.com.”

“Thanks.”

And we hung up. Turned out that reloading the app fixed it. And she did call back. Nice people at Jawbone. My hat is off to them. Before the internet, that’s something we used to say.