so to finish the tale i started in the last two blog posts, they finally restored my new macbook to "new" condition. which means that they wiped the drive and reinstalled the OS and i was back to square one.

the fellow who called did so from the center of Happy Apple Nirvana. i could feel him smiling from deep within the center of Brahman's navel (or is that Atman, i can never keep them straight) as he told me with complete and joyous calm that the computer was ready to be picked up.

i went into the store to pick it up and while i was there i grabbed a fire wire cord and a game for my daughter. everyone i spoke to was sooo happy and listened so well and was genuinely interested in everything i had to say. all my questions were answered quickly and efficiently and with great energy and near manic attention to detail. i'd stepped back into Happy Apple Land, after my sojourn in the bowels of, oh, i don't know, Apple Purgatory?

i remember going to see my sister when she was in college. she was majoring in theatre in a small college near (or in?) st. augustine. st. augustine is a touristy place. there is an old spanish fort there, and lots of historic places to see. if you are into the hyperreal, ripley's has a museum there. there are horse drawn carriages that trot down cobbled streets. there are great beaches, and an old cathedral, and so on. we went there a lot when i was a kid. we always had a blast there.

the st. augustine i knew from childhood is the one i have just described. but my sister lived in an apartment that was just behind that st augustine. it was a poor neighborhood. there were gangs there. the place where she and three other students and various others lived was pretty much a hell hole. the kitchen was unusable. literally. i had one of two lifetime run-ins with the paranormal on the metal fire escape stairs that led up to her front door. little claws running along my back. spooky as hell. the week after i visited, the whole neighborhood was effectively shut down due to a gang war, and armed gang members had to escort my sister and her friends from block to block whenever they wanted to walk anywhere. like say to the store or whatever.

so there is st. augustine. and then there is the st. augustine behind st. augustine.

now i've learned, there is Happy Apple Land, where everyone is a "genius" and they wear cool blue and orange t shirts, and they are all very happy to answer all of your questions, as long as everyone is staying inside the preconfigured Apple Swim Lanes.

but. go outside the swim lanes and suddenly you are being escorted through dangerous territory by rival gang members. this metaphor is actually quite a bit more apt than you might think.

this is a tale of two macs. or, two macbooks, to be a little more precise.

first off, for those interested, when i got my machine back, i had to move the data over from my old machine. except i couldn't do it the cool way. cuz i had vilefault enabled on the old machine. and i couldn't turn it off as there was not enough room on the hard drive for a complete copy of the Home folder. so it goes.

i didn't want to repeat the merry go round from before. so i just went with a brand new account and transferred the data over, directory by directory, file by file, the old fashioned way. and that was fine cuz it forced me to actually look at the data and think about what was there. i trimmed some of the fat. no biggie. and the firewire cable worked great.

i bought a macbook last january for my wife who was starting a master's program in humanities. her program is online and she needed a reliable machine. she needed a new machine, anyway, actually, as her old macbook just doesn't work anymore. at all. we can't even turn it on. it was the last of the motorolla macbooks and it's toast. so as it was in its final throes we went down and got her a new machine, an aluminum model, which apparently they don't make at the moment, in the macbook line.

so. around the time my machine came back, her machine started throwing kernel panics. oh and the iSight camera had stopped working a while back. but the kernel panics, well, when that happens the machine freezes, and whatever she was working on just goes away. poof.

so she put her data on a thumb drive. transferred it to my machine. and i took hers in for service.

so i walk into the Apple Store and say, hey, i need to drop this machine off for service. i know what's wrong with it, basically, and can someone take a look. and the person i am talking to starts telling me i need to make a genius appointment. i say, no look i just want to drop the machine off. and he gets offended, cuz i cut him off mid sentence.

he doesn't know about my very recent history with his store. he doesn't know that for me, just walking in there is now stressful. especially if there's a repair involved. all he knows is some asshole who needs to grow up and learn how to be polite just cut him off mid sentence and now his day has become stressful.

see at some point there is this big feedback loop that keeps getting worse. but i realize, right there, he didn't deserve that. so i try to smile and be a sane human being for the rest of the conversation. and i do that. so i pull out my Pro Care card. and he makes an appointment. and says that you know, someone will get back to me in a week or so. and then i say, well is that true? i mean, i'm a member of Pro Care (which always sounds like a dental plan to me), thought you guys were supposed to do this a little quicker in that case (or something along those lines). and now he has to remake the appointment. and he gets snarky with me several times. in fact at one point he stops himself and says, was that snarky? i'm sorry.

we were both kinda riding the edge, trying to be basically human to each other. but i did maintain my cool through the rest of the conversation. but see, what happened was, i walked into the store without an appointment. and this effectively puts me outside the swim lanes. and so, apparently, this causes dissonance in the mind of any Apple Store employee i talk to. they just can't handle it.

oh and btw what i learned was that, when doing a "quick drop", tell them you are a procare member, NOT a guest. cuz that way they will click the Member button on the web application screen instead of the Guest button. and then things will, theoretically, go faster.

so after putting in my data multiple times (like, i don't know, four or five times including associating my apple id with my procare id, which somehow was never done before) we finally get the order put into the system, and away goes my wife's macbook into the bowels of the store.

it has been, i think, eighteen days from that day. and to my knowledge nothing meaninful has happened yet.

which is why i have not written anything about this from before, because i figured it would save me some time to just write it all up at once.

but i've apparently gone inside the badlands. i'm in the Apple Store behind the Apple store. i'm at the part where various Apple employees try to walk me from street corner to street corner. but no one is really handing off anything. nothing is really happening. like i'm unstuck in time, or, i dont' know. pick your own vonnegut/kafka metaphor.

of course this is all ridiculous. it's not like anyone is losing any limbs, or anyone is dying. it's not like my parents innocently named me Harry Potter. the Apple Store didn't give me cancer. i must say though i'm glad my cholesterol is coming down because they might have given me a mild infarction or two somewhere along the way.

so the long boring stupid story is that, some days later they call and say that the machine needs hardware replacement parts. (see i totally knew that. i'd done my homework.) and they would have to ship it off somewhere, send it to a "depot" of some kind, as they didn't have the parts in stock. and did they want me to make a back up of the data?

so i go by the store, since this is all on my voice mail, and also whenever i call them back the phone rings and rings and no one picks it up. and i tell them, no, i don't need a backup. just please send it off so i can get it back and return it to my wife and get my macbook back from her and then i can install Notes 8.5 and i can go on with my life, get back to work on my novel, and basically return to normal. or what passes for normal for me, anyway.

ok so i didn't really tell them all of that. but that's what i'm thinking.

so they are all like, ok cool, we'll do that then.

and then a week later someone leaves me another voice mail. with the same message. they are going to ship it off, but, do i want them to back up the data first? just in case something goes wrong or they have to replace the hard drive.

i thought it was the same voice mail from before. i seriously didn't think it was a new one. and btw the last conversation we had with them, which was last night, they admitted it was the logic board. which has nothing to do with the hard drive. but let's forget about that for now. and get back to the 99 dollars they apparently really, really, reeeeally want to charge me to back up the data that they know i do not need backed up.

so i go by the store. in person. i talk to a guy in a cool orange t-shirt. i get his card. and i say, you know, it's funny. i had the same exact conversation with a guy, right here in this spot, a week ago. the same one! we are talking about exactly the same thing. we are talking about the fact that i don't want my data backed up. i just want you to send the machine off for repairs. that's all. no data backup needed, just send the machine off. now. thanks.

i was very nice. very polite. i smiled as often as i could. i just want to point that out. because after a while i get to thinking, this is just bad karma. i've done something wrong and i deserve what i'm getting. i was mean to an Apple employee who wasn't listening to me and wanted to unjustly charge me money for something that was not my fault. who just wanted me to line up and get into the Apple Certified Swim Lanes, where as much as possible Apple gets to push the hard work of fixing their broken shite onto their customers, and where possible, they get to charge us for things we don't need and should not have to pay for.

but i digress.

so this time i get a business card. the card is somewhere else and i don't remember his name and that is probably good because otherwise i'd likely blog it right now. but i have a business card and until last night it was squirreled away in my wallet.

so then today or yesterday or maybe wednesday (today at the very latest) i should, from the time of my last redundant conversation, be picking up the machine, with its new logic board. except i'm not.

do you know why not?

because yesterday morning, i got a voice mail asking if they wanted me to have them back up the data. because they needed to ship the computer off to a depot, where they can replace the hardware that needs replaced, because they are not able to fix the problem themselves. and this time he kindly leaves the price tag for me on the voice mail, in a cheerful, blustery voice. the cost is 99 dollars, and can i get back to them and let them know.

see how they did that?

lol!!

i mean that is just awesome. its like they've been up night after night reading Kafka, and figuring out how they can make the Apple Store more Kafkaesque. i mean it's only an Apple Store. how much harm can they really do to the world? they could get as Kafkaesque as they want and really, probably, no one would be harmed, per se. they aren't going to give me H1N1 just because they ship my laptop off to, er, Antarctica? by mistake or something. it's all ok cuz they all wear these really great t-shirts and stuff.

ok. so. this is the part where i make a declaration!

i'm never buying anything from Apple ever again. the Apple stock price can climb all the way to the moon, large swaths of which Apple will undoubtedly one day own, but i don't care. i might just give up computers altogether. eventually. at some point in the distant future. or, whatever.

i'm likely not going to blog about this again. so this is the end.