I Scream, You Scream, We all Sceam for I...pods

Not my best title. Granted.

The Boy has an Ipod Touch which he bought with his own money and is rightfully proud of. He's not super-possessive of it either. We all get time to mess around with the apps, run down the battery, and not charge it up again. He's cool with it.

He has it with him most of the time unless one of us has wandered away with it. Last year he would take it to school with him and listen to his tunes during art class (not to worry, though; that kind of deviant behavior has been cracked down on hard by the school this year!).

About a month ago, it stopped doing the number one thing it should do. It's an Ipod Touch and the touch part of it stopped working. It would come on, tell the correct time and that's about it. The touch screen was non-responsive.
Being the good mommy that I am, I diligently went through the "Troubleshooting Tips" on the Apple site and FIXED IT! That's right, me. I fixed it! I rock! Rename me Hero!

Last week though, it happened again. Same exact thing. Frozen screen. Nothing doing. This time the Tips failed. I went through them four stinking times and gave myself a splitting headache but the little gadget just wouldn't respond.

We picked up a warranty for the Ipod at the POS store when he bought it. What did our money get us? "Sucks to be you. Not our problem." Charming. Lesson learned.

Apple themselves wanted $30 to talk to them on the phone about it. Umm, no.

Or we could put it in the mail and wait and see. Again, no. Not liking the sound of that.

Or we could cruise to our nearest Apple store and talk to a real live human. That sounded good. The closest store was actually surprisingly close. It's in the hoity-toity shopping neighborhood only a short drive away. We made an appointment for 9 AM the next morning.

I can report it's very, very quiet and empty that early in the morning in Hoity-Toityville. Nothing is open. Nothing is moving except the street cleaner. The Man was predicting that we had made a 9 AM appointment in a store that wouldn't open until 10 AM. I had to agree. But as we came up on the door, it was unlocked, the lights were on and it had people in it. Quite a few people. I wouldn't call it bustling, but it certainly wasn't empty.

We were greeted at the door by people expecting us and directed to Lee the Genius, who would be taking care of us. It was like walking into heaven (that might be exaggerating just a bit, but it was extremely nice).

This story is already too long, so I'll wrap it up by saying that 10 minutes later we were leaving the store with a brand new shiny Ipod. The Boy's was really broken in a way that was nobody's fault and would be sent back to Apple for parts. It only cost us a car ride and a signature.

And since it was only 9:15, we went out to breakfast. Yay for stories with happy endings!