Reunion

Over a month ago something happened that had the potential to change my life. Looking back years from now, I may still find that it impacted me more than I can now realize. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen it coming for some time; there were warning signs, frowning faces, failure to communicate, and freezing up. It was painful to say the least.

After restoring things multiple times, it became apparent that I needed to see a specialist. So I bit the bullet, swallowed my pride, and went to a bar. My first trip to the bar was completely unhelpful, and in fact just irritated the problem further. I tried calling a help line for advice, but they just recommended I make an appointment at the bar to see one of the geniuses.

Long story short, last weekend I made it to the store and the genius at the bar said he could offer me a replacement. I took him up on it and I am now the proud owner of a new iPod. Apparently my old one was having hard drive “issues”.

It was very peculiar going from having access to every song I owned whenever I wanted it to not having any kind of portable music player at all for over a month. I helped me to not only appreciate my iPod more, but to also appreciate the atmosphere around me a bit more as well. There's a whole book that could be written on the differences in a society where the majority of the people walk around completely disconnected from the world around them.

One thing I definitely missed was the opportunity to listen to music I wouldn't normally be caught dead listening to. I despise pop music for what it has BECOME. I think it started off great, maybe, but now it is shameless and listening to it seems like a crime. This morning on the way to work though, I listened to Maroon 5 and it was glorious in all of its unadulterated, sickeningly sweet goodness. All the while the people next to me had no idea what was being pumped into my head :)

The most frustrating dialog from the whole broken iPod fiasco is recorded below:

Helpful: “What seems to be the problem.”

Me: “I completely restored my iPod multiple times when prompted to. Then it wouldn't even respond, including restores. This morning though I plugged it in to charge a bit before brining it in, and it turned on fine. Go figure, right?”

Helpful: “Well I guess we can still look at it. Maybe it’s software related. Does it have the latest software on it?”

Me: “Yes, it has the latest firmware/software upgrade. I think it is hard drive related since it won’t even mount in windows anymore.”

Helpful: “Oh. Well, we can’t actually open the case and look at the hard drive you know. Not in the store.”

Me: !!!!????

Me: “Yes, I realize that you can’t OPEN IT UP and LOOK at the hard drive. Don’t you have a diagnostic program you can run that will look for bad sectors on the hard drive or do some other kind of tests?”

Helpful: “Yeah, we can hook it up and see if any looks wrong”.

Me: (feeling oh so comfortable with this person's technoIQ) “Well thank you.”