Coming From A Place Of Anger

Oh hell.

I've been having problems with my cell phone, a Nokia from Cingular. Thinking that with the new job I needed a PDA, and deciding that Mac was never ever ever going to come up with an iPhone (just imagine what that would be like... remember what MP3 players were like before the iPod came along?), I decided to go for a BlackBerry.

I ordered. Fedex delivered. I got service. Good to go, right?

Not quite.

Early adopter that I am, I was once the owner of a Handspring Treo. And it was great. I totally relied on it. It ran my life.

I would drop my Treo into its little cradle hooked up to my Mac laptop, and it would get all synced up. A beautiful thing.

Tonight, I dropped the cd into the drive on my iBook G4, and that new software thing didn't happen. A wee bit of research and my worst fears were realized: the BlackBerry software isn't compatible with the Mac OS.

Like... expletive deletive!

Jump over to Google. Do a search on BlackBerry Mac, and I came up with "PocketMac for BlackBerry."

Woohoooo! A patch!

I downloaded. I installed. I launched.

Or didn't launch. I can click on that damn icon until the cows come home. Nothing is going to happen.

Time to call Tech Support, right?

Not hardly.

Remember back in the day when you could get tech support?

*sigh*

Well, those days are gone forever.

The folks at PocketMac will be happy to talk to me. For the low low low low price of $20 per "incident."

Why do I think that all of those phone sex entrepreneurs of yore have all switched to providing tech support. 'Member, where it was "free" to be teased, but if you really wanted to talk with a person (allegedly "HOT GUYS who are NEAR YOU looking for SEX NOW!!!"), you had to cough up. and then it all became a ploy to keep you on the phone longer and longer ("Do you want to know what I'm wearing? Yeah? I'd love to tell you what I'm wearing. I bet you really want to know what I'm wearing. You do, don't you? Want to know what I'm wearing I mean? I bet you can't guess what I'm wearing, can you? A jock strap? Do you want me to be wearing a jock strap? I might be wearing a jock strap. Do you want me to tell you what I'm wearing?")

I am so pissed off.

Handspring was a company that cared. Three months after I got mine, it dropped out of the pocket of my bathrobe and broke. I called Handspring (and got them on the phone no problem) and asked where I could take it to get it repaired. "Oh," the nice representative informed me, "I'm afraid we don't do repairs. But you should be receiving your replacement tomorrow morning."

Yikes! How much will that cost?

Nothing, of course.

And, of course, all I had to do is drop my replacement Treo in the cradle and it synced right up with all my data and I was good to go.

The software from PocketMac is free, and I wish it wasn't. I'd pay money for one that worked.

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