Well, now I have a new Macbook called Saskatoon, and Sweetiepants is on her way to Apple central, probably to get spruced up for sale as a rebuilt machine. I wish her well!
I miss Sweetiepants. But I like Saskatoon. Do you want to hear the story? (This will probably be of interest only to Tom and perhaps to CBAM, but heck, they're my core audience.)
After a flight on an airplane, Sweetiepants started crashing without warning and intermittently. Then, she wouldn't turn on at all. Apple replaced her motherboard. The problem got better, but didn't go away. Then an Apple "genius" worked on updating her OS for 2 hours while I waited in the store. The problem didn't go away.
Then, on yet another trip to the Apple store, I met a "genius" who told me that Macbooks of Sweetiepant's generation just aren't compatible with the older router protocols, and they crash sometimes, and that's just the way it is. Therefore, he couldn't fix Sweetiepants, and I ought to just head home and not worry about the crashing.
Yes, you may recall this line of thinking from your childhood: Macs crash, that's just the way it is!
Well, Tom told me that just couldn't be true, and I called Apple and indeed, the people on the phone agreed. But just to pause a moment, Tom and I used to work on a Mac in college that was about 1,200 years old, and crashed all the time, then started up again faithfully. You could like see smoke coming out the back of the thing as it chugged along. It was like the little engine that could.
But that is not the kind of laptop I was looking to own.
Anyway, much time on the phone with Apple ensued, and I reached Saskatoon Ron, an Apple customer service troubleshooter guy who works in snowy Saskatchewan. He is a really nice person, but because Apple had only done one hardware repair, he couldn't order a replacement for Sweetiepants. Instead, he set up an overnight express repair in Tennessee, but I'd have to mail Sweetiepants away for a week.
I remained calm for like one day. Then, I spazzed. I couldn't be computer-less for a week. I wrote Ron a very long e-mail. Ron found it in his heart to order a machine replacement, even though he had to override company protocol or something.
A huge thank you to Ron! We have spent probably 3 hours on the phone by now. But last night, I picked up Saskatoon and handed over Sweetiepants to the "geniuses."
They are not really geniuses, by the way.
In short, I'm a huge fan of Saskatoon Ron, but not such a fan of Apple. In any event, make sure you get that expensive extended warranty on your Mac!
Saskatoon Ron is a nice person.
And Sweetiepants was a very nice computer, before the crashing started. She rode every day to the Secret Archive in the rain on the back of my bike, and never crashed once!
So long, Sweetiepants.
2 comments:
I'm glad that Apple did finally go ahead and do the right thing. It's a shame it took them so long to see the light. I am sure Sweetiepants is in a better place right now (though hopefully they actually fix her instead of just selling her to some rube).
Good work saskatoon ron!
I love the story of that little Mac we used in college for laying out the Fed. It was the Quadra and as I recall there was once a situation where it was called on to layout an entire issue of the paper. It hung on for 8 days, performing diligently and faithfully. Only after the paper was safely printed did it once more resume its regular crashing.
And that is the story of the 8 days of Quadrica. Which I am sure the current generation of Feddies has completely forgotten. Ingrates! They don't know how good they have it.
I envision a long and happy life with Saskatoon.
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