It’s been 6 days since I sent my iPod in. I haven’t killed my cow orker in the next cubicle yet, but I’m feeling a tiny bit stabby. The Apple (lack-of-)support site has a status of “Dispatch Sent”, whatever that means. The Repair Status Details page says that they received it on the 19th, and nothing further. How long does it take them to charge it up, hit “play”, and look 3 hours later and see that it’s not playing any more?
Category: Rant
You know what’s even more annoying?
You know what’s even more annoying than having to reburn a DVD and spend two hours preparing a test? When you go to burn the DVD and it hangs up your entire computer, flashing the caps lock and scoll lock keys on your keyboard, forcing you to power cycle the computer. And it happening not just once, but four times with your last two DVD blanks. THAT is annoying.
You know what’s annoying?
You know what’s annoying? Having to rebuild two systems back to the previous version, burn a new upgrade DVD (when you’ve only got 2 DVD blanks left) and upgrade the two test systems back to the new version with the upgrade DVD, all because you put “||” where you should have put “-o”. That’s annoying.
How stupid can you get?
I just attempted to join Rochester FreeCycle out of a sense of futility at all the stuff we had to throw away when we moved. But when I attempted to join, I got an email that consisted of a Word document. strings(1) indicates that it’s just a page of plain text, asking me some questions. So why the hell is it a Word document? Are they saying that people who don’t have $700 to waste on a software package or who aren’t willing to pirate software aren’t welcome? What about people who refuse to read email on Windows?
Sure, I could probably fire up OpenOffice.org and read it, but why the hell should I? If it can be expressed in plain text, then send it in plain text dammit! And if it can’t be expressed in plain text, I probably don’t want to read it. I read my email using a plain text mail reader (mutt) and it works ssh’ed in from work, or over a modem connection from Ottawa, or (in extremis) using a 2400bps modem on a tiny little PDA screen. I’m not going to change that to suit you, so don’t even try. And calling me a Luddite isn’t going to change anything.
Time for iPod number 5?
After my post Time to find out if my iPod AppleCare is valid, I decided to try calling Apple Support. As expected, dealing with Apple Support was time consuming and painful.
The first problem is that this iPod is not the one that I registered AppleCare for. As anticipated, this meant that I couldn’t just register on the support web site for the repair. So I called. And as anticipated, the support guy couldn’t figure it out. At least not without putting me on hold about 4 times to consult with other people.
In spite of the fact that in order to activate my AppleCare extended warranty I had to enter all sorts of information on-line, it’s evidently damn near impossible for Apple Support technicians to type in your name and maybe the serial number of the iPod you currently own, and find out the serial number of the iPod that this one was a warranty replacement for, and maybe the contract number for your extended support contract. Haven’t these people ever heard of databases?
Anyway, he eventually figured it all out, and he’s sending me a box. But he warned me that if I send in the iPod and they test it and it’s not less than half the advertised battery life, they’ll just ship it back and charge me for the shipping. So suddenly I was worried that my one test wasn’t good enough. So I charged it all the way up, and at 5:00pm I unplugged it, turned off shuffle play, hit Play, and left it. Two hours and 20 minutes later, I looked and it was dead. Ok, I guess that qualifies.
I figure this battery replacement will get me another year out of this iPod, and then I’ll buy a photo-iPod. Or by then, maybe a video-iPod.