An hour of my life is gone — an hour that I’ll never get back. I passed this irreplaceable hour diddling with an iPhone that refuses to stay charged longer than an hour.

Well, maybe longer than an hour, but not much. Let me back up before I get into the diddling and explain a few things.

First, I am not great about remembering to turn my phone off. Second, I also forget to plug it into the charger when I remember that I forgot to turn it off. Still, I think the battery should last longer than it takes me to drive from Andalusia to Opp and back without plugging it into a power source.

Yesterday I turned it on when I left my house to teach a yoga class at LBW. It had that happy green bar at the top of the screen telling me it was fully charged. When I got home, I threw my purse in a chair in the bedroom and didn’t give a thought to turning the phone off.

You guessed it. This morning the lovely green bar was gone and a little red strip announced that the battery was dead as a doornail. So, I plugged it in to charge, again. Then I decided to research why it dies so quickly and to see if there is anything I can do about the problem.

That is where the diddling started. I went online and typed the words, “iPhone won’t stay charged” into the search box. Well, up popped about a zillion sites ready to help me fix my phone.

The first one offered 11 ways to improve battery life. That sounded good so I clicked it and I waited, and I waited and I waited. It seems this site needs to work on improving its ability to open quickly before it addresses phone battery issues. I gave up and moved on.

Another click took me to a website offering five fixes for iPhone battery problems. Sounded good, but I decided to keep searching. I opened one site that promised to give me all the answers I needed. All it gave me was a bunch of technical jargon that made my head hurt trying to read it.

Nope, exited that one in a hurry.

More scrolling and I came to what must be the most thorough site for addressing these type things. In bold letters it announced, “26 Ways to Improve Your iPhone.” Surely at least half of these would provide some improvement.

So, here I am an hour later. I changed settings I didn’t even know existed, and I have no idea what I’ve done. At the website’s suggestion, I dimmed my screen so now I have to kind of squint my eyes to see it.

I thought I turned off notifications because they drain the battery, but the darn thing keeps chiming every so often. I’m sure it’s trying to notify me about something; I have no clue what.

When I started this column, my battery showed it was 55 percent charged. It is now at 51 percent. Is this better than before I started diddling — who knows.

What I do know is I spent precious time trying to improve the battery life of a phone that I’ve used maybe twice in the past three days. Wait, I checked my recent calls and messages, and I haven’t used this phone since last Thursday.

So, now more than an hour of my life is gone never to return. I spent it diddling with and writing about diddling with a phone I hardly use. One that is also costing me about $30 a month more than what the nice lady who sold it to me said it would cost.

Right, I forgot about that detail.

Let us see how much of my life it will take to solve this problem. I’ll just do a search for “iPhone hardly used, won’t stay charged, costs too much …”