One bad Apple don't spoil the whole bunch, girl...
Here's where the big Mac addict, the guy who's been thinkin' different since he used Apple IIe's in college, who's owned a Classic, a Performa, a Centris 650, and a G4, and brags about their Swiss watch-like performance to anyone who will listen, has to sit the hell down and shut the hell up. At least for a few minutes.

My iBook... you know, that pretty little white notebook computer with the glowing Apple logo that cost me about twice as much as a comparable Gates/Allen powered product would have? That I drove up to Peabody for, just so I could buy it at the ultra-chic Apple Store and bask in the attendant coolness of the experience?

It, uh, quit working.

Crashed, gave up the ghost, shit the bed. My Apple went rotten. Instead of Apple pie, I'm eating humble pie. After years of trouble-free computing, I've been blue-screened.

Well, actually, black-screened. The monitor backlight fritzed out. Or something. You see, I really don't know. All I know is that the logo quit glowing, and the iBook became a piece of inert sculpture. I found this mighty inconvenient, so I bundled it up in its custom made, form-fitting carrying case, bellied up to the Genius Bar (for those not acculturated to Mac lingo, that's the Service Department), and requested accommodation, pronto.

They looked at it, scratched their heads, and then seized it. A malfunctioning Macintosh? We have to hide this! I thought they'd pop the hood, put in a new dilithium crystal, and slide my 'puter back across the high-gloss black counter lickety split. Well, no. They don't actually repair these things in-house, you see. For anything beyond chips and cards, they send them to Memphis.

Memphis!

I guess it's a good central location for their tech monkeys. It makes sense to have the service center there, because Memphis is both a FedEx and UPS hub, which must be why Apple uses Airborne Express.

Kept it a week, they did. Irked me, it did. A frickin' WEEK?!? Don't you know who I AM?

Here's the bit that's most relevant to the few readers I have left here after my credibility lapses... you know, I'll post more often! I'll make appointments with my Weblog! and stuff like that... My Radio software resides on the iBook. The iBook is, in fact, the only CPU in Superelastic Iconoclastic's inventory. So I was locked out of my own weblog until the machine came back to me. There's no www login screen for Radio UserLand, no e-mail posting feature, or anything like that, so I couldn't blog from work (though I did leave a clue in the Comments, if you were intrepid enough to look there).

Come to think of it, if I could blog from work, I'd soon have plenty to blog about... my lack of employment, my emergency job search, Christmas on the dole. So status quo seems best.

So, obviously, my iBook's back now, though it won't tell me what made it sick... perhaps it's being all surly because I forced it to ride round-trip to west Tennessee as common cargo. The invoice said It needed part number APPP72B. I'd like to know if I did anything to hasten the demise of my original APPP72B, if I'll need to replace it every twelve months, if there's anything I can do to properly maintain it and prolong its life. The obvious question, what's an APPP72B, would betray my lack of geek knowledge, so it will remain unasked.

I was sour there for a while, feeling betrayed by the Mac culture. But after sitting here with my treasured, reinvigorated portal to cyberspace, held in thrall by its brightly shining screen, all is forgiven. And I hereby retract all these Mac blasphemes I've written. (Did I actually write comparable Gates/Allen powered product? Well, it is late...) 2:27:07 AM    comment []trackback []