steelcityman

For years now I have been  cajoled, advised, laughed at, call it what you will…for not having ditched Windows and converted to the Holy Grail that is… iOS .. Apple … Mac, again call it what you will. I can hear my mate Dave, a colleague  from my working days in the Hull City Council Youth Service, telling me that he had been an Apple convert for years, and how ditching Windows in Favour of the said Apple was the best thing he had ever done..well, in computing circles anyway!!. He was always cajoling  me to swap over. I just didn’t relish the great change I thought it would be, and so never made the leap of faith.  Being a poor pensioner now (sob! sob!) and on a very limited income, I have thought that to invest in an Apple type machine would be a very expensive and frivolous use of my meagre resources ….. but…… as I am very much a person with expensive tastes and of a frivolous nature to boot, when one of my deferred pensions matured recently (August) I decided to exercise my penchant for frivolousness and invest in a MAC BOOK AIR and risk storing all my stuff in the clouds…well in CLOUD, if you know what I mean. (That in itself required a huge leap of faith as, if you are one of the tortured few who read my stuff on a regular basis, you will know all about my chronic TECHNOPHOBIA and inability to understand ‘KLINGON’)…I mean, how would I be able to store my many documents and saved bits in a filing cabinet you couldn’t see because it was in the clouds???…My son-in-law explained it to me and after a while and a few Jamesons best Irish, it didn’t seem as bad as I first envisaged. ….(thought to self….I must write a piece on how well the amber essence of Ireland helps the thought processes to develop.. or, if you are one of the lucky few who read about my exploits on a Sharra Bang trip to the English Rivera, how well the amber essence of Ireland, namely Jamesons, helps diminish the destructive effects of that dastardly noise called Country and Western music !!!!) …I digress….sorry…. Anyway I bought, at considerable expense, a MacBook Air….not from the local Apple store…Oh! no…I tried, but I had to make an appointment to see a shop assistant (I think they call them a Genius now, not a shop assistant…what is the world coming to ???)…and the next appointment was for, like, four days away!!! I couldn’t wait that long or the chronic Technophobia would raise it’s ugly head again and take over…no!! … I had to strike whilst the iron was hot,  and ordered one from the Dot com Apple store on line

My heart beat didn’t slow down for a good few days as I was still in shock at having spent so much money …. and then the guilt set in, “My goodness!! I am a selfish git” was one thought amongst many that ran round my empty head…but then in the grandest traditions of the theory of  COGNITIVE DISSONANCE …(Leon Festinger, 1957) …I began to rationalise my selfishness until it didn’t seem such a bad thing to have done after all…..

ANYWAY! I got a delivery date, over a week away as it was being assembled in China!!…why did that not surprise me?? and had to be shipped from Hong Kong, … BUT….all flights were suspended on the day of dispatch because of a violent Cyclone over ….you guessed it…Hong bloody Kong!!..more waiting, another day not being able to leave the house!!  Eventually it was delivered and I broke three finger nails trying to open the box within a box. Talk about a kid with a new toy!!

Eventually, I plugged it in and switched it on…great… it worked, and for the next couple of weeks I was busy learning all I could about the iOS x and what the machine could do … or rather,  what I didn’t understand about the machine and what it could do!!. Being the aforementioned Technophobe that I am, I found the differences between Windows and iOS a little hard to come to terms with. I was still trying to make the software work like Windows did….not a good idea …. Then, quite out of the blue, the machine did not switch on when I pressed the power button..several presses later the machine still did not switch on…then it came on of it’s own volition … just as I was in mid swear! Several days later it did it again, or rather didn’t do it again(switch on that is!) … next press of the power button and it switched on. Next day it refused to switch on at all. It switched on the day after, so, quick as a flash whilst it was working, I rang Apple in the hope they could help me. I had an extremely nice Dutch lady on the phone for about 30 mins as she talked me through a set routine of operations…delete this file…delete that file, move this to there and switch this on etc..etc…now switch the Apple off and see if it will start again…Zilch..Nada…nothing…not a squeak nor a sausage out of the Apple !!! It was arranged for a local Apple repair shop to pick it up by courier and… a week later the repair shop rang and said, “We can’t find anything wrong with it…there is no fault”..so back it came and sure enough it switched on first time, even worked well for a couple of days and then …. DURN DURN DUUURRRNNNN!!!. (say it musically and it will make sense .. hopefully )…I began to think my finger was haunted !! My belief in this phenomenon was firmly cemented when I used another finger to switch it on and IT WORKED…once more with the ‘Haunted’ finger …and it refused to switch on!!!..Rang Apple again…another repair job was organised and they rang back a week later and said…guess what?…” Sorry, can’t find a fault. We’ve been switching it on and off for a week solid and it works every time”…So Apple wanted a video clip of me switch it on and it not responding….I waited another four days, filming every switch on and finally got a video of it not switching on, sent it to Apple and still Apple would not change my haunted machine. They wanted another video of it not working!!! This time they said they would TRY to get my machine changed if I could show it not working. So the second video was sent this last Friday….no response yet I await with baited breath……………………Well, I did tell you it was the SAGA of a BAD APPLE……I’l keep you posted whether APPLE live up to their good (up to now) name. If I get a new machine to replace this haunted one I will be a happy bunny…. TTFN.