Karma....
There are a couple areas of my life with which I consistently experience a lack of fortune. The most prevalent are electronic devices (quite an inconvenient situation for me) and flying. On the first score, recent examples include my experience with my various Treo phones and even more consistently, products from Apple Computer. One day about 3 years ago I purchased a new PC for my wife. Jody is a prodigious digital photographer and she was in need of an ever increasing amount of processor power, RAM, and disc space to process and store her work. I had an existing XP network and figured I would add the new machine to our 100 MB LAN to which I would attach a separate file server. The long and short of it was that the new machine, also formated with XP, absolutely refused to recognize my network. I actually know a thing or 2 about networking and nothing supposedly designed for a consumer should ever be this hard. That day, in a fashion typical for me, I ditched everything and purchased a truckload of Apple gear: a dual processor G5, a 17" PowerBook (for Jodes), a 20GB iPod, a 23" Apple display, Airport, etc etc). It wasn't long before my G5 started to crash on a regular basis. I learned from my buddy Gordie, who is an engineer at Apple, that this was a kernel panic, kind of Apple's version of the blue screen of death so familiar to Windows users. It was then that I had my first interaction with what is probably the worst support organization in existence, Apple Care. Apple absolves itself of providing any support by relegating it to an outside organization, related only in name. This is a brand new $5000 workstation and these clowns want me bring it to an Authorized Apple Repair Center. Huh? I can buy a bottom-of-the-line PC from Dell and a personalized support web interface comes with it gratis and now I have to haul this marvel of industrial engineering resplendent in its pure aluminum exterior to some remote outpost manned by the same snotty jackasses from the phone? I don't think so. Let me speak with someone who gives a shit. I get this pompous assclown who insists on speaking to me in the first person plural. "Did we run the hardware diagnostics?" " and when we did that did we boot from the CD?" "and did we...." Uh, hold on there Sporty, WE didn't do anything, here's what I did. By the end of the conversation, I more or less forced this guy to send someone to my house. They replaced the RAM and one of the 2 processors at random. The mobile tech reported that he couldn't find anything wrong with the hardware (he ran the same exact diagnostics that I did) but replaced one of the processors because he happened to have one with him. The result was as you would imagine, no change. I went through another round of verbal jousting with Apple Care on the phone eventually getting them to agree to replace the machine. Upon receiving the new machine, I decided that I would burn this one in myself. I unpacked it and turned it one adding only the latest software updates from Apple. Without even so much as logging in, the machine starts to suffer from kernel panic. This machine is even worse. Apple Care refuses to replace the machine or come to the house. The only way I can deal with it is to deliver it to a Service Center and wait for them to figure it out. If whatever remedy is taken does not work, I'll have to transport it back to the Service Center, and so on. Totally unacceptable. During one of my many rants, a sympathetic (and very patient) Gordie mentions that Steve Jobs has a public email address that he actually reads. I figure what have I go to lose and compose a 2 page letter describing my experience with Apple thus far to Mr. Steve. I was completely shocked with I received a phone call about a week later from his assistant. He was very apologetic and informed me that they would be sending me a new, upgraded machine directly to my home free of charge. My new machine had an extra gigabyte of RAM and an upgraded video card. Since then, I've had problems occasionally, but nothing like the first 2 chassis. That's only the story of my G5 though. After adding RAM to Jody's PowerBook the machine would freeze up with the Apple "black screen of death". I went through 4 separate sets of chips with the same result. I always purchase the extended warranty so we sent it in for repair. After explaining at length that we had replaced the physical RAM many times without remedy, Apple Care promptly replaced the RAM and sent the machine back. Jody pushed it right back across the counter and refused to take it back. She suggested that they might try reading the notes this time. The next time it came back with a new logic board and it's been fine (although it runs at very high temperatures) ever since. I purchased a 15" Macbook Pro when I started at Blue Lithium. Within 2 weeks it started crashing (black screen of death again). The best part is that it crashed on the morning of my first presentation to the Board of Directors at BL. The Apple Store is directly across the street from my office in San Jose, so I walked over with my machine and waited for the store to open. Even after explaining my desperate situation, I was told that no help was available. I had to signup for an appointment, the first available was at 2:40, well after my presentation was scheduled to begin. I can understand maybe not having time to actually work on the machine without notice, but the bastards wouldn't even let me leave the machine there, forcing me to make another trip. Not having time to debate the issue (I had to go and recreate my presentation on my Dell laptop) I reluctantly walked to a machine to secure an appointment. One of the morons thought it would be a good idea to chat me up on the way over, "Having some problems with your new Macbook are you?", to which I replied "Dude, get the fuck away from me." I returned later that afternoon for my appointment. True to form, the tech didn't even turn the machine on, he registered the machine to be sent out for repair. Yeah, we couldn't have done that the first time. When I finally received the machine from repair the motherboard and the RAM had been replaced. Not very impressive for the latest, greatest from the fruit guys. My good friend Paul Butler has a theory that I must have a very high personal electromagnetic field (EMF) that wrecks havoc with the circuitry of any device I touch. Absent evidence to the contrary, I'm starting to buy it.
More germane to the moment is my luck when it comes to commercial aviation. I have a long history of horrifying experiences traveling the worlds airways. I flew to Holland in the last row of an L-1011 in the center seat. On the return trip from Switzerland, I was seated in the last row of the non smoking section behind a guy who reclined his seat with such force that he nearly fractured my kneecaps. On one occasion it took me 3 days to get home from Denver, becoming trapped in the Reno airport and finally forced to ride a bus home. Even the bus ride was painful as I received the last available seat, next to the only other huge person on board. So, I shouldn't have been surprised when I arrived at the Minsk airport today only to have the Lufthansa computer system die as I waited to check in. My luggage has been tagged and check through 2 transfers BY HAND. I am not optimistic. While waiting in the terminal to board, there were some guys next to me speaking english. I asked one of them why they were in Minsk, because you don't run into many Americans in Belarus. They were a group of 15 or so active military personnel dressed in civies. They are part of an inspection and verification detail that travels to countries that we are in cooperation with to inspect their military facilities for compliance with various arms treaties. Those countries in turn send similar detachments to the U.S. for the same purpose. "Trust but verify" I'm told is their motto. I'm impressed that Belarus would be part of such a program and just happy to hear that we have them at all. The trip to Frankfurt, site of my first transfer, was uneventful. I sat next to an older German gentleman and actually managed to have some light conversation using my remedial capability in the teutonic language. In the other seat, an attractive young woman from Minsk (Rochelle ... Rochelle.. :-) on her way to Tunisia for a vacation with friends. This was her first time on an airplane and first time outside of the former Soviet Union. She was very sweet and very excited as you might imagine. At Frankfurt, we have to ride a bus from the plane a considerable distance to the terminal. I'm disappointed to see one of my newfound friends from our military not give up his seat to an elderly woman having difficulty standing directly in front of him. I have to make what seems like an endless trek across the terminals to get to my next flight. I'm fading a little, last night's drink and dance exacting it's revenge. Along the way I pass through the requisite smoking sections found in most European airports and I'm getting a headache and starting to feel ill. After checking into Economy Plus (thank goodness a United flight) I have time to do some stretching before boarding. It's always of critical interest who you'll be seated next to for such a long flight. My karma normally dictates that I be placed next to the smelly guy, the other huge guy, or any number of general psychotics and misfits. As I approach my seat, I notice the woman who could be a supermodel seated in the window seat of the row that might be mine. As I get closer, I notice that 2 rows in front of her, there's another very attractive German woman seated in the window seat of a similarly promising aisle. Not surprisingly when I finally reach my seat, it is in the row that splits the rows occupied by hotties. Jody will approve. I'm seated next to a non descript, standard German businessman. At least he's not supersized or smelly, I'll take what I can get. While we wait to taxi, the passengers kept trickling in as we boarded the plane and we missed our slot for push back. I know this specifically because I always listen to the cockpit chatter on channel 9 when flying United. The ground control operator has been telling our pilot to hurry it up. There is a back up and delay already and if we miss our prescribed start up time, we'll be delayed at the gate a minimum of 20 minutes. Of course we miss our slot and are accordingly delayed. We are mid flight as I write this and I'm low on battery power and brain cells. I'll post the conclusion of my trip separately.
Until then...
There are a couple areas of my life with which I consistently experience a lack of fortune. The most prevalent are electronic devices (quite an inconvenient situation for me) and flying. On the first score, recent examples include my experience with my various Treo phones and even more consistently, products from Apple Computer. One day about 3 years ago I purchased a new PC for my wife. Jody is a prodigious digital photographer and she was in need of an ever increasing amount of processor power, RAM, and disc space to process and store her work. I had an existing XP network and figured I would add the new machine to our 100 MB LAN to which I would attach a separate file server. The long and short of it was that the new machine, also formated with XP, absolutely refused to recognize my network. I actually know a thing or 2 about networking and nothing supposedly designed for a consumer should ever be this hard. That day, in a fashion typical for me, I ditched everything and purchased a truckload of Apple gear: a dual processor G5, a 17" PowerBook (for Jodes), a 20GB iPod, a 23" Apple display, Airport, etc etc). It wasn't long before my G5 started to crash on a regular basis. I learned from my buddy Gordie, who is an engineer at Apple, that this was a kernel panic, kind of Apple's version of the blue screen of death so familiar to Windows users. It was then that I had my first interaction with what is probably the worst support organization in existence, Apple Care. Apple absolves itself of providing any support by relegating it to an outside organization, related only in name. This is a brand new $5000 workstation and these clowns want me bring it to an Authorized Apple Repair Center. Huh? I can buy a bottom-of-the-line PC from Dell and a personalized support web interface comes with it gratis and now I have to haul this marvel of industrial engineering resplendent in its pure aluminum exterior to some remote outpost manned by the same snotty jackasses from the phone? I don't think so. Let me speak with someone who gives a shit. I get this pompous assclown who insists on speaking to me in the first person plural. "Did we run the hardware diagnostics?" " and when we did that did we boot from the CD?" "and did we...." Uh, hold on there Sporty, WE didn't do anything, here's what I did. By the end of the conversation, I more or less forced this guy to send someone to my house. They replaced the RAM and one of the 2 processors at random. The mobile tech reported that he couldn't find anything wrong with the hardware (he ran the same exact diagnostics that I did) but replaced one of the processors because he happened to have one with him. The result was as you would imagine, no change. I went through another round of verbal jousting with Apple Care on the phone eventually getting them to agree to replace the machine. Upon receiving the new machine, I decided that I would burn this one in myself. I unpacked it and turned it one adding only the latest software updates from Apple. Without even so much as logging in, the machine starts to suffer from kernel panic. This machine is even worse. Apple Care refuses to replace the machine or come to the house. The only way I can deal with it is to deliver it to a Service Center and wait for them to figure it out. If whatever remedy is taken does not work, I'll have to transport it back to the Service Center, and so on. Totally unacceptable. During one of my many rants, a sympathetic (and very patient) Gordie mentions that Steve Jobs has a public email address that he actually reads. I figure what have I go to lose and compose a 2 page letter describing my experience with Apple thus far to Mr. Steve. I was completely shocked with I received a phone call about a week later from his assistant. He was very apologetic and informed me that they would be sending me a new, upgraded machine directly to my home free of charge. My new machine had an extra gigabyte of RAM and an upgraded video card. Since then, I've had problems occasionally, but nothing like the first 2 chassis. That's only the story of my G5 though. After adding RAM to Jody's PowerBook the machine would freeze up with the Apple "black screen of death". I went through 4 separate sets of chips with the same result. I always purchase the extended warranty so we sent it in for repair. After explaining at length that we had replaced the physical RAM many times without remedy, Apple Care promptly replaced the RAM and sent the machine back. Jody pushed it right back across the counter and refused to take it back. She suggested that they might try reading the notes this time. The next time it came back with a new logic board and it's been fine (although it runs at very high temperatures) ever since. I purchased a 15" Macbook Pro when I started at Blue Lithium. Within 2 weeks it started crashing (black screen of death again). The best part is that it crashed on the morning of my first presentation to the Board of Directors at BL. The Apple Store is directly across the street from my office in San Jose, so I walked over with my machine and waited for the store to open. Even after explaining my desperate situation, I was told that no help was available. I had to signup for an appointment, the first available was at 2:40, well after my presentation was scheduled to begin. I can understand maybe not having time to actually work on the machine without notice, but the bastards wouldn't even let me leave the machine there, forcing me to make another trip. Not having time to debate the issue (I had to go and recreate my presentation on my Dell laptop) I reluctantly walked to a machine to secure an appointment. One of the morons thought it would be a good idea to chat me up on the way over, "Having some problems with your new Macbook are you?", to which I replied "Dude, get the fuck away from me." I returned later that afternoon for my appointment. True to form, the tech didn't even turn the machine on, he registered the machine to be sent out for repair. Yeah, we couldn't have done that the first time. When I finally received the machine from repair the motherboard and the RAM had been replaced. Not very impressive for the latest, greatest from the fruit guys. My good friend Paul Butler has a theory that I must have a very high personal electromagnetic field (EMF) that wrecks havoc with the circuitry of any device I touch. Absent evidence to the contrary, I'm starting to buy it.
More germane to the moment is my luck when it comes to commercial aviation. I have a long history of horrifying experiences traveling the worlds airways. I flew to Holland in the last row of an L-1011 in the center seat. On the return trip from Switzerland, I was seated in the last row of the non smoking section behind a guy who reclined his seat with such force that he nearly fractured my kneecaps. On one occasion it took me 3 days to get home from Denver, becoming trapped in the Reno airport and finally forced to ride a bus home. Even the bus ride was painful as I received the last available seat, next to the only other huge person on board. So, I shouldn't have been surprised when I arrived at the Minsk airport today only to have the Lufthansa computer system die as I waited to check in. My luggage has been tagged and check through 2 transfers BY HAND. I am not optimistic. While waiting in the terminal to board, there were some guys next to me speaking english. I asked one of them why they were in Minsk, because you don't run into many Americans in Belarus. They were a group of 15 or so active military personnel dressed in civies. They are part of an inspection and verification detail that travels to countries that we are in cooperation with to inspect their military facilities for compliance with various arms treaties. Those countries in turn send similar detachments to the U.S. for the same purpose. "Trust but verify" I'm told is their motto. I'm impressed that Belarus would be part of such a program and just happy to hear that we have them at all. The trip to Frankfurt, site of my first transfer, was uneventful. I sat next to an older German gentleman and actually managed to have some light conversation using my remedial capability in the teutonic language. In the other seat, an attractive young woman from Minsk (Rochelle ... Rochelle.. :-) on her way to Tunisia for a vacation with friends. This was her first time on an airplane and first time outside of the former Soviet Union. She was very sweet and very excited as you might imagine. At Frankfurt, we have to ride a bus from the plane a considerable distance to the terminal. I'm disappointed to see one of my newfound friends from our military not give up his seat to an elderly woman having difficulty standing directly in front of him. I have to make what seems like an endless trek across the terminals to get to my next flight. I'm fading a little, last night's drink and dance exacting it's revenge. Along the way I pass through the requisite smoking sections found in most European airports and I'm getting a headache and starting to feel ill. After checking into Economy Plus (thank goodness a United flight) I have time to do some stretching before boarding. It's always of critical interest who you'll be seated next to for such a long flight. My karma normally dictates that I be placed next to the smelly guy, the other huge guy, or any number of general psychotics and misfits. As I approach my seat, I notice the woman who could be a supermodel seated in the window seat of the row that might be mine. As I get closer, I notice that 2 rows in front of her, there's another very attractive German woman seated in the window seat of a similarly promising aisle. Not surprisingly when I finally reach my seat, it is in the row that splits the rows occupied by hotties. Jody will approve. I'm seated next to a non descript, standard German businessman. At least he's not supersized or smelly, I'll take what I can get. While we wait to taxi, the passengers kept trickling in as we boarded the plane and we missed our slot for push back. I know this specifically because I always listen to the cockpit chatter on channel 9 when flying United. The ground control operator has been telling our pilot to hurry it up. There is a back up and delay already and if we miss our prescribed start up time, we'll be delayed at the gate a minimum of 20 minutes. Of course we miss our slot and are accordingly delayed. We are mid flight as I write this and I'm low on battery power and brain cells. I'll post the conclusion of my trip separately.
Until then...
posted by Jaybeau at
3:59 AM
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