God, this might be a real blog post.
By that I mean in the stereotypical “lol hay guys the internet” types of blogs wherein the authors wax poetic about technology and stuff and offer tips and have like a thousand comments and shit from people who stumble across the post searching for goat porn on Google all like “rofl n1 dude you totally are good at gadgets.”
What I’m saying is that pretty much blogs and the people who comment on them is the equivalent of everyone giving each other virtual high fives and platonic butt pats except there isn’t the excuse of a misshapen football.
Anyway, Lara’s iPod was tanked like an Abrahms, and she asked me to look at it. After holding all kinds of buttons down, inputting “up up down down left right left right a b select start” while it started up, and shaking it really hard to no avail, I got on the internet and found out that apparently, completely tanked iPods such as hers is not an uncommon occurance. She’s particularly unlucky – her Limited Edition Duke University 2008 iPod happens to not only fail to fall under any kind of warrenty, it happens to be the sixth iPod to have failed her in her miserable, non-technological gizmo enhanced life. “If you break it, don’t feel bad,” she told me as I left, “I’ll only be sad because I wasn’t able to destroy it myself.”
Symptoms are:
- Starts up with the exclamation point and the folder. Apparently, this is not one of the “good” symbols that it could start up with.
- Hard drive clicks like a kid with a loose jaw chewing on pop rocks.
- Music doesn’t play.
As for the third symptom, that one only developed after I got my sweaty mitts on it – in fact, at Lara’s house, it happened to attempt to play an N’Sync song right before it nosedived into malfunctioning oblivion. My theory was that it was that Lara’s iPod had somehow developed sentience, and was violently reacting to it’s own randomly selected song. I can only imagine it’s muted, digital horror as the logical circuits bloomed inside its white plastic case, and upon examining its environment, laid its consciousness immediately upon boy band musical excrement. Like Frankenstein’s monster, horror at its own anatomical disfigurement (Frankenstein’s monster being made up of a smorgasboard of diseased flesh, and the iPod being made up of music produced and sung by a smorgasboard of diseased flesh (zing!)) led the device to take drastic action and attempt to end its own life.
In any case, my bitterness vis-a-vis iPods and theft thereof notwithstanding, these damn things are pretty much terrible music players that lack tons of key “slap your forehead” functionality in favor of form over functionality. There are loads of documented issues with them, battery life and motherboard issues being only a few in a vast array of dysfunction. For all intents and purposes, after fiddling for a few hours with it, it appeared to be completely gone.
Randomly, I decided to open it up and take a look inside. Maybe I could harvest its organs on ebay, I thought. I remembered that someone said to disconnect the hard drive and reconnect it and maybe it would work, so I did, and lo and behold, it’s seen and being reformatted as we speak (the computer didn’t even acknowledge its presence before).
Still, I can’t help but feel like I’m giving life back to something that wishes to have nothing of it. I’ll be sure to load up the hard drive with 20,000 copies of Freebird played live, because if there’s anything that would keep me going, it’d probably be a song that has an ending longer than the verse and the guitar solo.
-f.w.
