A small, but important victory. For months, the connection between my phone's charging port and the charging cable had been growing increasingly finicky. My phone is four years old. Other than the charging port, I had no reason to consider replacing it. But each night the fight to get the cable to connect to the phone and actually charge became increasingly frustrating. It used to just be a matter of firmly pushing the cable to be sure it plugged in. Then it became necessary to push at a particular angle. Eventually I was spending two minutes each night jiggling the cable and pushing at *just* the right angle to get the phone to finally begin charging.
I figured I had two likely options: 1) Suck it up and get a new phone, because four years is at least a halfway decent life-cycle for a phone. 2) Buy a new charging port and install it myself. Option 2 was obviously more Mustachian, so I started some Google research in hopes of pulling that off. Google gave me a much better result than I had hoped.
The solution? Simply use a paper clip to clean out the charging port! I was amazed at how much dust was in there, especially since I thought I had cleaned it several times by blowing in it. After three minutes of cleaning, I plugged in the cable. The connection was instant and the charging commenced without so much as even a small struggle.
Here's to at least another year with this phone! (Fingers crossed.)