My shiny new computer went on a trip north last weekend without me. It’s still there. I got an email from it Wednesday saying it missed me and would try to be home soon. I miss it too. It’s the first time it’s been away overnight. I hope it’s the last. It went away to fix a congenital defect, more than a blemish but less than cancer. Since week one, I’ve been on the phone with AppleCare techs, but they’ve been no better than your average HMO in diagnosing and solving this disease. At some point, you just have to take charge of your own – or your computer’s – destiny and take it to the emergency room computer store.
Okay, enough cuteness. Here’s the deal: my wonderful, stupendous, fast as lightening and twice as nice state of the art PowerBook had a flaw that was, if not fatal, a huge pain in the butt. At random, unexpected moments, it would suddenly emit a loud noise, not unlike the sound you hear when you pick up the phone when a fax is coming in. And it would continue to make the horrible, grating shriek from that moment on, until you shut it down or sometimes if you put it to sleep. This didn’t happen every few weeks. No, it occurred daily. Practically hourly. And sometimes just for fun, instead of making its growly scream, it would simply distort the actual dings and chimes and mp3s. Sometimes from one speaker, sometimes both. Fun stuff. No amount of zapping p-ram and reinstalling the system and resetting the power manager helped, either. We’re talking one seriously fucked up laptop. And no, it wasn't the fan or the hard drive. I know what those sound like. And yes, AppleCare dudes, I really do know what I'm talking about even though I'm a girl. At least the Genius Bar guys at the Apple Store treat me like a thinking human being who knows when her new computer is a lemon.
Bye-bye baby. Nice knowing you, however briefly. I hope when you come back home, you still remember me. I’ve tried to take good care of you, make you feel at home here. I hope when you come home from the Apple Repair Center, you haven’t decided they’re your new best friends just because they tickled your belly and fed you nice treats. I have sweet treats here too. Lots of words to crunch on, nice Photoshop files for you, too. Come back home. I miss you. But leave that nasty whine behind, okay?
Posted by Tamar at September 24, 2004 11:14 PM