Tuesday, August 9, 2011

The iPod Miracle


The iPod Miracle

 About a year ago my iPod Touch died. Maybe died isn’t the correct term. More went into a coma. A coma where all the lights went out but you knew that somewhere deep down intelligence still lived. One knew this because though the screen was blank, the thing still worked. If I put on my reading glasses and shone a bright light at just the right angle, I could even turn it on and make it play music. But basically, unless you are the kind of nutcase who listens to the same music (Sinatra, Ella, Leonard Cohen) and/or the same audiobook (The Power of Now) over and over, the unit was a write-off. It was too much of an eyestrain to get it to do anything. Fortunately I am just that kind of nutcase. It remained on my docking station month after month, delivering the words of Eckhart Tolle that ushered me to sleep night after night.

Why didn’t I get it fixed? Because we don’t fix things, especially electronic things any more. We throw them away and get the next generation device. Fixing it under partial warranty would cost only $50 or so less than getting a brand new one with HD video recorder. I didn’t need an HD recorder. I didn’t want to spend $200 get it repaired under Apple’s less-than-ideal warranty. I didn’t want to be without Eckhart for the weeks it would be sent away. In short, ever stoic, ever lazy, ever frugal, I left things as they were.

I still had my laptop. I still had my Kindle. I still had my ancient cellphone which can’t even shoot video. Then my Kindle went into a coma. The Hercules screen saver got ripped across his midriff, leaving him leglessly battling a serpent. In the bottom half, under the tear, the Kindle worked perfectly. Above it Hercules remained, gradually disintegrating into a morass of vertical lines as the days went by. I called Amazon. They sent me a brand new one. God bless them; they want me to download more books. The Kindle episode was an omen. A precursor of good things to come. A harbinger of the iPod miracle.

The other morning it happened. The iPod screen plinked to life. Great sound, that plink by the way. Some of the sounds in Microsoft, like in Publisher when the red X comes and something is disallowed, are horrible. Like being whacked over the head by a bent aluminum gong. But I digress. The screen came on, informing me that after a year on the charging dock, my battery was fully charged. Yay. And that the date was July 21. As it was August, I suspect it meant July 21, 2010, perhaps the day of the coma’s onset. No matter. I began to play with it. The light screen was on but the touch function was dead. No matter how many times I slid the glowing bar nothing happened. Still suffering paroxysms of hope I pawed at the screen, turned the unit off and on, pawed some more. Somehow, incredibly, the date and time became up to the minute correct. I felt like Dr. Frankestein must have on seeing the Monster’s finger twitch. There was only one thing to do. I plugged it into the laptop and let it figure things out. Somehow, between me, the laptop, the iPod and the Internet, healing began. Settings were restored. New software, new iTunes were downloaded. Ultimately and gloriously the thing began to work! As I whooped joyously around the house I did not pause to reflect on how all that meditation, all that Eckhart, had failed to detach me from identification with possessions. Who cared about that crap when a miracle had occurred? My iPod had been healed.

1 comment:

Bren said...

I'm sending my old Sony VAIO over to visit with you. Maybe that will encourage the battery to charge and coax the dead Indian ants out of the screen hinges.