Tag: Apple

North Dreadful

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The next day

Thursday afternoon we went for a dog walk, and while we were out it got even hotter and more humid. When we arrived home, we jumped in the pool. I put my iPhone well away from the water because we all know that iPhones are easily ruined and had to get out of the pool to answer my phone when it rang.
There is a certain style of customer service which is employed for especially valuable customers, either to handle a high profile person or to remedy a past problem. I received the call and immediately heard the urgency in her voice and went inside to take notes.
In her eagerness to help me, “Deb” kept accidentally calling me by my first name, then hurriedly correcting herself and calling me “Mrs….” As it turns out, we are just high profile enough, and had just enough of a problem to fall into both categories, so “Deb” was giving it her all and going to fix everything.
At the same time I started getting texts from my husband, the Medium Cheese (he is why we warrant the special treatment). I had to juggle the phone, continuing with “Deb” and letting the Medium Cheese know that he was making my iPhone buzz in my ear during my phone call. My texts to him say, “Getting smothered right now…like a Persian cat rubbing your legs right after you slathered them in lotion.”
By the time our conversation was finished, I was shivering and took a hot shower. We even had plans to go out to dinner. I got out of the shower to find the house was fully engulfed in a violent storm, with thunder, high winds and driving rain. In the midst of texting the Medium Cheese (who was on his way home on a Metro North Train) about the storm, the power went out.
I next wrote, “The long conversation with the Persian cat means my phone is almost dead.”
The Medium Cheese’s train then stopped. “We will have to sit in Chappaqua ’for a few minutes,’” he wrote. “Which means they don’t know.”
The source of the delay was a tree on the tracks, and I was advised to fetch the Medium Cheese from the train station in Chappaqua.
Turning right out of our driveway we encountered the first downed tree across the road almost immediately, at the top of our next-door neighbor’s driveway. Reversing, we discovered another mess of downed trees tangled in power lines about a quarter mile in the other direction. There was another way out, and we took it, but our way was blocked by another large tree which had pulled down the power lines. We reversed again, and made our way on the last possible route. This final attempt ended when we found the road blocked by a very large tree, about two miles from the red barn where we live. The Medium Cheese had to find his own way back. We were trapped.
The only way back was to re-trace our route, and when we got there we got busy lighting candles and deciding what we would eat, given that the dinner plan had been to eat out so we had nothing on deck. We ate the potstickers from the freezer and as much ice cream as we could. 
The Medium Cheese never made it home. His train was over an hour late, but he couldn’t get past the downed trees from the other direction, either. He went and found a hotel.
I checked the NYSEG web site before bed (having mostly recharged my phone in the car), and saw their estimate that the power on my road would be restored by 3:00 pm the next day. This gave our minor emergency an ending, in the near future, and made the situation seem like a non-event.
We woke to a stuffy, quiet house. I was quite awake before six, and walked a dog, and checked on the status of the fallen trees. Overnight road crews had removed the obstacles and our daily newspaper had been delivered. We cooked up all the bacon and fried some eggs, hard-boiling the rest of the dozen. I checked the NYSEG web site and it had changed the status of our repair to the next day, in the afternoon. The non-event felt like a minor emergency again.
In the afternoon I drove to the airport to pick up our oldest son and he had more friends with him than I had anticipated, so we drove home to our hot, dark house with an over-full car. I gave the houseguests a lesson in flushing toilets with a bucket of water from the swimming pool, and we all had a specific disappointment: there would be no hot showers despite a many-hour plane ride from Europe. Not long after this disappointment, I checked the NYSEG web site and found that the status of our road’s power outage repair had changed from the next day to a blank. I called NYSEG at this point, and spent 25 minutes on hold. I was told that the time was not posted because they no longer knew when power would be restored. We ate out.
That night, I woke at 1:57 am, very hot. I thrashed around for quite a bit, and then my phone rang at 2:25 am. I made motions to answer it, but saw it was a “425” number and decided it was a wrong number. I have had this number for almost two years, but I still get wrong number calls for the old owner of it. I imagine that someday each of us will have one number for our whole lives, but for now, I will still get calls for “Brian.”
I checked the NYSEG site then, and it was still blank.
I managed to get back to sleep.
For breakfast there was coffee (using a French press and bottled water and lighting the gas stove with a match to boil water) and cereal with less-than-ice-cold milk from the cooler. After a few hours of lying around we rallied and went to the grocery store.
On the way we had to detour around the first work crew, addressing the downed trees and power lines closest to our house. A NYSEG crew had commenced work despite the lack of a planned time of completion. We met the second NYSEG crew at work on the other mess of trees and power lines, and we were told by the only guy who didn’t look busy (the grumpily scowling guy standing in the road with no gear, no uniform, no helmet and no sign), “Road closed. You gotta go the other way.” 
I told them to hurry.

Also the next day


How cold and bright and startling is the American supermarket after a few days of no electricity! We replenished the drinking water supply and planned to barbecue. It had come time to buy plastic forks and paper plates as well, since we had run through the dish supply.
I think it was at this point, after the grocery store run but before the power came back that I dropped my iPhone in the toilet. Back when I was teaching at my last teaching job, I used to hear the sounds that high school girls make when they drop their mobile phones in the toilet. My classroom was across the hall from a bathroom, and while they were never supposed to take out their phones except during lunch, they often took advantage of the privacy of a closed bathroom stall. As for me, I did not scream.
As we re-stocked the food shelves and re-organized the coolers, a scheme was devised whereby the overflowing sink full of dishes would be washed by hand using pool water. All of the big pots were filled and set on the stove to boil. The sink was about half full of hot water when the light in the kitchen changed. The hood above the range had come on, for power had finally been restored.
My husband, the Medium Cheese, is also a Relentless Troubleshooter, and by the time we got down to making that dinner, my calls had been forwarded to another phone, and my profile fully installed. It feels almost like magic when technology works, and your pictures and contacts and apps are all there in the new handset. It reminds me that the iPhone is, for me, a nearly perfect device, with exactly three flaws: the battery life is too short, it is not waterproof, and it is made by workers who work under conditions so dire they must be prevented by nets from throwing themselves from their dormitory windows.

Storm victim found in road


 

Letter to a CEO #1

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Today I wrote a letter I have been meaning to write for a while. 
 
Tim Cook, CEO

Apple

1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

29 January, 2012

Dear Mr. Cook:

No doubt you had a worse day than I did last Friday. The New York Times piece about working conditions in the Chinese factories Apple uses was damning, to say the least.  My 8th grader’s missing Spanish assignment pales in comparison.

I am an Apple customer. Between my husband and three children and me, we have an iPad, two iPad 2s, six iPhones, three MacBook Airs, an Apple TV and a 27” iMac.

Since your background is in operations, you may not yet be known as an innovator. You have a unique leadership opportunity to set the example for your entire industry to build devices without polluting and to employ workers humanely, by insisting on safe working conditions.  The energy your company spends to defend itself against critics of these practices could be invested in vigorously pursuing what you know is just. Your legacy could be leading the way for your entire industry to build better, cleaner machines which do not just reflect your design specifications, but your values.  Be the innovator who raises the bar for sourcing ethics.

I do not exaggerate to say that as loyal customers we would gladly pay more for products made by workers who do not require suicide nets to keep them from flinging themselves from the windows. Better still, bring the manufacturing of Apple products back to the United States, as President Obama asked in his State of the Union address last week.

Sincerely yours,

Maggie Russell Berkes

P.O. Box XXX

North Salem, NY 10560

Absolutely True and Completely Unexpected Message #4

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This appeared in my inbox yesterday. How unlikely for Mark Zuckerberg to have a Hotmail account! What an opportunity! Yeesh.



Dear Friend, 


My name is Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer of Facebook. We have recently partnered up with Apple regarding a one-time test project today, we are finding people who can test the upcoming Apple iPad3 and keep it for free. Apple mackintosh want to make their product perfect before going public. We select users from our system database randomly and you have matched with our latest drawing. 


We are operating this project for one-day only. All you need to do is CLICK HERE to check out our web site made for this project and fill out the short survey to obtain your chance of test an iPad3 and keep it for free. Simply make sure you enter your email so we can locate our records to guarantee that we have reserved one for you. That’s it! 


If you have any question or concerns, feel free to e-mail me back. However, you need to claim 1st to ensure one will be set-aside for you before the deadline ends. We do understand that you may not receive this e-mail until after the deadline, but, we suggest you check out the web site to see if we still have yours on hold, which we often-times do because others may haven’t claimed theirs in time. 


Mark Zuckerberg 
CEO, Facebook

Why I Love Microsoft Paint

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There was once a time when owning your own PC was kind of a big deal.  We had the earliest versions of the IBM PC and ran MS-DOS and had a monochrome monitor which was amber because the relentless trouble-shooter thought it was superior to green.  It sat on a metal desk that fit together with hand-tightened screws and had a section with an oblong cut-out for the continuous-feed paper to go into the dot-matrix printer from a box on the floor.  We bought a box of floppy disks for it, and you had to be careful with them because if they got bent they wouldn’t work.  The PC came with manuals that were held in little three-ring binders. I vaguely remember actually looking up things in the manuals, the way you might have looked in your car’s manual for information about what kind of tires you use or how much gas the tank actually holds.  Before there was the world wide web, there were local networks, like the one I used at the University of Utah, accessing it through our dial-up modem, but search engines were a few years away.
Instead of learning to write computer programs in BASIC, the generation just before me had to use punch-cards and main-frame computers. Instead of getting scientific calculators they had to learn to use a slide rule. We got the chunky TI-30s, with red LEDs. You could enter “07734” and say hi to the person behind you. I broke mine again and again, because they did not survive a fall from high school desk height.  I probably would not have made it through AP Calculus had we needed slide rules to compute logarithms. It was a pretty close call as it was.
I have been through many generations of TI calculators since then, and with every generation they make the appalling choice of changing all the menuing and key-strokes.  By the time I retired from teaching a few years ago (for the second time) I no longer taught students how to do things on their TI-86s; we would search the term together in real time on the SmartBoard, launch the giant calculator application, and punch it in.  I expect that Texas Instruments line of scientific calculators will go the way of the slide rule, having been absorbed functionally by laptops or tablets or smartphones. The savings in batteries will be significant. If any of my sons goes to business school, he will no doubt cover them in his strategy class, just as we learned of the sad decline of Kodak.
I remember the first version of Windows that we ran at home, and I remember playing Reversi on it. I also have vivid memories of drawing on the computer, using MS Paint.  Over the years, this little program has had only a few features added, so using it is like a trip back to the early days, with diskettes and DOS prompts.  It’s awkward and sometimes clicking the little paint bucket yields surprising results. It feels like drawing with crayons. All of my drawings with it are charmingly terrible.  Even a copy-and-pasted screen-shot done with Paint looks kind of crummy.  I do not think I have ever needed any help with it at all. With every new generation of Windows, Paint is still there, unchanged, untalented and unappreciated. By the time Microsoft sees fit to eliminate it for something better, it may be on a version of Windows I don’t buy, because I will have moved on to a Mac.   

The Best and Worst Phone, Ever

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Last September, I expressed a vague desire to own an iPhone 4. I have owned a lot of different phones over the years, all of them chosen for me by someone who closely follows the latest in hardware, and I have usually been pretty happy. I have had issues with AT&T’s coverage, which has not improved for me since the mid-1990s when I got my first Nokia phone. I could take you on a tour of where I consistently drop calls (405 South and Federal Avenue E, for example), but that might be even more boring than I am willing to be on this blog.
Instead of an iPhone 4, I was given a Sony Ericsson Xperia.  Research had revealed this to be the newest and one of the best of the Android phones.  Reviewers liked its large screen and Sony design quality, and we were still clinging to the idea that we could have cool stuff not made by Apple. I turned the phone on in mid to late September. Probably the most complex and interesting thing I ever did with this phone was install the Amazon app and buy a book while I sat at a coffee shop. It took some pretty decent pictures, but I have to say that a high-end phone that does not take good pictures these days would be hard to find. I was able to read my Gmail account any time I wanted, but my other email never worked properly, requiring me to manually ask it to refresh two or three times before it would download mail, if it would download mail at all.
I put a few apps on it, like Facebook, which lacked a number of editing features that I find really important, like turning a picture or adding a caption. I patiently upgraded the software, thinking it could only get better. If “better” were “hotter,” then it could be called “better.”  I found that if I made even one phone call it needed recharging by 3 pm, which is the one time of day a busy mother needs her phone to just work.  Running out of battery might have been something I could work around if the phone worked well as a phone, but it was hard to answer, hard to dial, froze when I got a text and sometimes dropped calls because the operating system crashed.
Texting may not be your cup of tea, but it is how the busy mother tracks her offspring today. My family got tireder and tireder of SMS gibberish from me, and I don’t just mean auto-correct hilarity.  Texting with this phone requires a kind of patience that modern products no longer require. Opening an SMS conversation with someone I exchange texts with frequently caused the thing to go into a self-reflective meditative state often ending a program crash.  Laggy, buggy and frustrating: who has time for this?
Today, I bought an iPhone 4, with service from Verizon, and started the process of porting my number to it.  The Xperia will go into the pile of other discarded phones, where it will stand out for being the shiniest and most promising in addition to being the one used for the shortest amount of time.  I have a name for things like this, which look like they are going to be amazing, and then disappoint: rubber candy.