A Moment’s Reprieve

I’m behind in just about everything in my life right now because of my work on the Very Big and Important Project. I haven’t been able to do the things I have wanted to do with my friends because I have been spending so much time trying to stay on task with this project and I’m really hoping that they payoff will be worth it should everything work out for the best. This is going to be a less formal post than maybe I have been sharing recently as I have come to recognize the fact that I have been self-censoring a lot lately. A. LOT.

I haven’t been very up front with myself about a lot of things and the other day I sat down to get some work done on The Project and I started writing a down some points on what I wanted to accomplish. I do this when I’m having a mental block and low on inspiration or direction. The writing didn’t stay on topic for long and I ended up writing a ton of crap which came completely out of left field. Some of this stuff was very striking as it was on a couple subjects in my personal life I wasn’t wanting to acknowledge or had been avoiding. I realized it had been a very long time since I had written as candidly as that even for myself.

I am returning my iMac this week. That has turned out to be somewhat of a severely disappointing situation and I will say this to you, my gentle readers, and to any people random search engines throw my way:

The current revision of the iMac line (the late 2009 revision) is not to be purchased lightly. Do not buy one of these machines casually and expect for everything to be great. Though they are the most beautiful and refined desktop computers ever crafted in history in terms of design, their internals are the rotted spawn of satan.

Here are the issues I had with mine when I first received it:

• Yellow/jaundiced screen
• Extended boot times
• Failure to start from external drive
• Inconsistent wireless networking

I dropped it off at my local Apple Store on a Friday and received some awesome, top-notch assistance in reviewing the problems. I never heard back from the Apple Store. The next Thursday I called and was informed it had been ready for several days already and that they were unsuccessful in reaching me to let me know. I was irritated by that as the ONE feature I have come to find reliable from AT&T is the voice messaging system. I would know because I get more voice messages than I do successful phone calls. I went in to pick up the accursed machine on Friday after work and received excellent assistance from the people in the store.

The problems started when I got to my car. I noticed that the stand for the machine seemed a little scuffed up, but it looked like this was not permanent. I got it home and found that the new LCD panel they installed was still yellowed and to my dismay there were now dust and smudges in-between the outer glass and the LCD panel itself. At this point I was getting wary and was giving the machine a lot more scrutiny and I found that the glass on the display hadn’t been mounted correctly, leaving it skewed and off center and that the aluminum casing had been scuffed and damaged in several locations on the corners. It was at this point that I became furious.

It was irritating that I got a machine which was not in working order. It perturbed me to take the iMac in for repair less than 72 hours after I took receipt of it. It irked that the repair personnel didn’t bother to call and then lied about it. I was now mad that the display still was not fixed, infuriated that the repair personnel didn’t bother to complete the repair properly, and incensed that the manner in which they handled my computer SCRAPED AND GOUGED THE SOLID ALUMINUM CASE!

Dear person(s) responsible for the piss-poor work on my iMac,

If I ever meet you I may feel the need to scrape and gouge your face with the same force it took you to mar SOLID ALUMINUM. Alternatively I may feel inclined put contacts in your eyes containing dust, fibers and fingerprints. When you break something while doing your job, you report it and take corrective action. That was a dick move and karma will kick your ass up around your ears for being a douche.

XOXO,
Eli

I called Apple the next morning and very politely informed them that I was having problems and to see what could be done for the situation The guy on the phone was nice enough but clearly not listening as he kept trying to have me describe where on my laptop the damage was. I had to explain and then re-explain several times that I was using an iMac. He kept speaking over me trying to pawn me back off on the Apple Store. I had to stop him and just lay it all out and the more I talked about it the more upset I was beginning to feel about the situation.

I did not just spend my own hard-earned cash to buy an expensive new computer just to become Apple’s bitch and jump through hoops to somehow magically earn a fully-functional computer. That is not how this business/customer relationship works. You ship me a shit product, you make it go away. I very politely informed him that I was done and that I wanted to return the machine, the end. He woke up from autopilot, stopped feeding me crap lines and shut up for a moment and got me in touch with a product specialist who had his shit together.

I was informed that they wanted to “capture this unit for technical analysis and review” which sounds fancy. I gently informed him that I don’t care what they do with it, I just no longer want to see this stupid crap machine in my home anymore. He offered to replace the computer with a brand new one and I agreed. As sick to death of this whole process as I may be, I still need a new computer and I’m not yet at the point where I’m willing to spend any amount of money on a PC as a primary computing device.

At this point in time I’m now waiting for magical things to happen inside the walls of Apple so that my iMac is taken away and a new one is custom configured and shipped to me directly. If this new one is not in good order there will be much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. As it is, I’m really hoping that Apple will be kind enough to provide me with AppleCare as a result of all this crap to cover the new iMac once it arrives. Considering how much effort has gone into it so far, I think it would be the least they could do.