The 2gen iPod Nano of Doom

[the_goren_show]

I love my 8GB iPod nano.  I do.  It's small, durable, functional and good looking - I like the sleek black look.  I got it three months after they released the 2 gen (as far as I remember) and it's been with me through thick and thin on cold night shifts, hot days stuck in traffic driving home and all the rest of the places I have used it.

From day one though, it occasionally acted up.  Windows didn't want to mount the drive at times and would disconnect/reconnect the iPod so many times so fast that the noise would just about make me nuts.  It needed to be rebooted every now and then when we were out and about and I soon mastered the click the hold button, hold down the two points on the clickwheels and wait shuffle.  I eventually got Windows sorted out by assigning a permanent drive name to the iPod and plugging the USB connection into a different port as the one I habitually used had issues.

For three and a half years, the iPod was no trouble.  It sat snugly in it's leather case and played music.  Then, this summer, it started to do something odd.  As in really odd... as in it would BSOD.  I would go to turn it on and the screen would go white, then pale blue.  Usually the music would still play and I would just do the old reboot scenario since the whole point of having the nano over the shuffle is being able to see what's playing or choose what I wanted to play.  I didn't even know it was possible for an Apple product to have a blue screen of death event, but mine proved it was indeed possible.  Too bad the techs at the Apple store have never seen it and seem to refuse to believe it happens.

I did take it to the Apple store the first time it happened, explained what was happening and had their tech people look at it.  They found nothing wrong with it and at my choice, restored it to the basic configuration.  When I got home, I had to put it back to a Windows configuration and reload all the music.  But the BSOD events were once in a while, not even once a week so I didn't think much of it until late July when it seemed that I was rebooting the stupid thing everytime I powered it up.  This was now three or four times a day and I even restored/reloaded a number of times and it didn't seem to make much difference.

Finally, on September 9 of this year, I was in the mall where the Apple store is and the iPod, hereafter known as the Nano of Doom, was behaving.  I went to the car and went to plug it into the jack to listen on the way home and lo and behold - BSOD.  I took off back to the Apple store to show them what was going on.  Naturally, by the time I got there it was fine and then my annoyance began.  I tried to explain to the woman I was talking to about how frustrated I was with their product and she showed me the new touch screen Nano - which I do not like - that they had just released that day.

Yes, there I was complaining about a product on the day of release of a new one.  I don't like your new version of iTunes and I can't revert to the previous version and I don't think that making everything smaller is the solution.  Smaller is not always better.  No, I don't want a new one, I want the one I have, the one I know and grudgingly have come to love to WORK.  No, I don't want you to sell me a new one, I want you to help me fix the old one.  No, I don't want to go online and buy (and yes, she actually did call it this) an "end-of-life" one.   No.  No.  NO!  You are not listening to me, lady.  Your product is annoying the hell out of me and I want your company to fix the problem.

In the end, I left with the Nano of Doom, a headache and her business card pulled from her little metal neck pouch on her little lanyard in my hand.  The first garbage can I passed became the recipient of the business card and my second run-in with Apple's customer service had left me just as pissy as the first.  I need to go get another MP3 player but I'm not sure I'm ready to go deal with the Apple Store and their gang of little blue shirted, khaki panted sales Gestapo.  I don't want to turn in the NoD, though they will give me a discount on the new one (NoD MkII?) because as annoying as it is, I'm attached to it.

Right now, I'm doing nothing and learning to ignore the BSOD.  It's easier on my stress level.