Bad Apples

Wonky iPad traded in. What are the chances of getting a bad Apple? The screen kept freezing and no amount of rebooting or erasing settings—even resetting the OS to factory did not resolve the problem. After much cajoling, and posturing, the Apple Genius reluctantly admitted it was the iPad at fault, and since I had been complaining about it for months, they gave me a new one, gratis, though it was over three months out of warranty. And no, I hadn’t dropped it, taken it snorkeling, or sat on it, etc. The Apple Genius remarked that the wonky iPad and case were in remarkably pristine shape. It was a bad iPad. This time the customer was really right. He relented.Voilà! Within minutes, I had a brand new iPad in my hands. I was spending some serious quality time during the last days of the year in the Apple Store, I uploaded my OS, apps, and photos from iCloud. After a couple of hours or three, I was finally good to go. Sort of. Good/bad news: the new iPad works, it’s super fast, it doesn’t freeze like the old one, but as soon as I got down the road, I discovered that there was no cellular. No cellular reception at all. I was on the phone with T-Mobile all afternoon trying to problemsolve. Nada. Yes, I had three bars, but no reception. They were puzzled as from their end it was all systems go, but they at least admitted there might be a problem at their end. New towers, etc. Which didn’t make sense. But no matter what I tried, the iPad had no cellular reception. Full bars, all systems go, but, nada. Maddening. After much consternation, rebooting, etc., with myriad tech support phone calls to both Apple and T-Mobile, I gave up and headed north. But then, I finally figured it out. It hit me like a flash as I was driving back up I-580. Stuck in traffic, I took out my amethyst earring stud, pushed the gold post into the hole, and popped out the SIM tray. Yep. No SIM. Empty. I turned around and headed back toward Emeryville. This was becoming like the movie, Groundhog Day. Unfortunately the Apple genius forgot to swap out my SIM card. Who’s the genius now? Chasing darkness, I raced back over to the Emeryville Apple Store right before it closed, and luckily they had not recycled the old iPad yet. The old SIM was still in the broken iPad. I popped the SIM in. Online again. Occam’s Razor gave us a particularly close shave. Persistence was the aftershave.

From Facebook, rev. 12/21