Do I sound bitter? I think I have every right to be, but the truth is, the guys I spent the afternoon - and evening - with were fantastic. They made the practices of Humility: seek wisdom from others and and Equanimity: Rise above events that are inconsequential much easier than they could have been. I had to miss my Mussar group. I had to miss my workout. I had to buy dinner out (but I turned it into a Never Done opportunity by going to the Chelsea Market, which is amazing, vast, and as Mickey put it, like Wonkaland, with all the delicious things to offer.)
Briefly, the deal is that ever since I bought my computer and iPhone, the syncing has given me trouble. Randomly, contacts and calendars will duplicate. I've spent hundreds (not an exaggeration) of hours troubleshooting, cleaning up, and fixing the problem, only to have it happen again. Apple has told me that "some people have this problem" and hasn't been able to solve it. Recently something worse happened -- my entire calendar disappeared. I've been trying to work that out on my own for about a month, and then today I finally went in for help. It turns out that the problem started when Apple created a new iCal, which is not compatible with my operating system -- which is not very old; my computer is a mere toddler, at three. It turns out, the day they launched iCal, it wiped my calendar. And then when I started to re-build it (from memory and old backups) it would not sync with my iPhone. This problem was so deeply hidden that it took four hours and two Mac Genius guys and three MobileMe online chat specialists (the Geniuses were on the chat line with the MobileMe specialists) to conclude that my "old" operating system was just not going to support this new calendar. But damn, were they persistent! And diligent. And good-natured. And communicative.
So if they weren't the problem, what was? I think it's the Apple corporation, who upgraded their calendar to something that is incompatible with the machines of millions of users, and so are forcing millions of people to upgrade their Operating System (as of May 5.) And this doesn't come free. Snow Leopard costs $39 (although my Geniuses gave it to me for "free.") (The quotation marks, in case you missed it, are supposed to indicate that spending 6.5 hours of my time isn't exactly free.)
And yet, somehow, I have brand loyalty to Apple. Maybe it's because their machines are so pretty, and maybe it's because they're so user-friendly to intuitive types like me, but maybe it's because of guys like Chazz, who stayed well past the time the Genius bar was closed, to see me through to resolution (for now.)
(Update: new problem, discovered the following morning: now that I upgraded to Snow Leopard, iTunes doesn't recognize my iPhone. iThink that sucks.)
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