But It Was an iPhone Glitch, Baby!

Image credit: Photo by CJ Sorg on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

The Junky's Wife recently forwarded me a news story about a woman who posted a question to Apple's support forum about a possible problem with her husband's iPhone. "Susan042764" from New Jersey asked if there was any known issue with iPhones attaching and e-mailing photos by themselves. Apparently, when she found naked pictures of her husband attached to an e-mail to another woman, her husband told her there was a porn ghost in his machine that sent them without his knowledge.

He claimed to have been as shocked as his wife was to find racy pictures in his outbox and told her he had even dutifully taken the phone to the Genius Bar at a local Apple Store, where he was informed by experts that this kind of thing has been known to happen.

Of course, the people on the Apple Support forum told Susan042764 in no uncertain terms that her husband was lying, and some people have supposedly expressed skepticism that the story is even real. After all, to someone who hasn't lived with an addict, it sounds unbelievable. Who would send naked pictures of himself to another woman and then, when faced with proof, blame it on an outrageous technical problem rather than just admit he'd been caught with his literal and figurative pants down? And who, for even a minute, would believe that it was more likely that Apple was shipping possessed iPhones than that her husband would lie and cheat?

Yet, I've certainly known that kind of thing to happen. When you live with an addict, strange things happen all the time. Porn or alcohol or drug paraphernalia just shows up, mysteriously. Computer problems and untrustworthy house guests and incompetent service people abound in the lives of addicts. When I was doing the laundry several years ago, I found a receipt for drinks for two, and when I asked my husband about it, he told me the waiter must have made a mistake. He was in a hotel bar alone, had ordered a drink, didn't like it, and immediately ordered a second. Why the receipt read "Guests: 2" was a mystery. Something about that didn't seem right to me, but my husband wouldn't lie. Would I trust a busy waiter more than a man who refuses to call in sick to work when he's not sick?

Addicts lie, sometimes outrageously, to protect their addiction. And the people who love them, believe them. I don't know whether the story is true or whether Susan042764's husband is a sex addict, but I do know it was a story of a very familiar kind of insanity and that nearly everyone who has been close to an addict will have a story a little bit like it.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.