I'm coming out

I just realized something important about myself. And this is a major, major insight, and not just more of my whimsical blithering. No, this is seriously big news. So I'll make like Britney and tell the internet first:

I'm Apple's bitch.

I've been using Macs since 1985 or so, starting with a 512K. I'm on my seventh, the most recent model being a total lemon. Total, because since August, 2003, I have had to send it back to Apple to be repaired three times. On top of that, there have been various phone calls and smallish trips to the local Apple stores and such. What with all this down time, I'm lucky I'm not actually trying to earn a living with the fucking thing.

I'm also on my second iPod. The first, the original click wheel model which had a big five, count-em, five gigs of storage (for those of you who are keeping score, the latest model has 60 gigs) finally pretty much died. Apparently the rechargeable battery had been recharged too many times and--in a way eerily reminiscent of my mother when I was say, 13 years old--it had decided that it had. had. it. And considering that this iPod was so old I practically could have used it to store 8-track music files if not 78 rpm records of Caruso's greatest hits, maybe that's OK.

So I got a new iPod. I got the iPod mini, the turquoise colored one, because I was feeling frisky. I don't know--I kind of wanted to thumb my nose at all the people who would assume I'd get the pink one.

Well, I didn't feel frisky for long.

I brought my new lil cute iPod home and charged it, then set it up with my laptop to download the songs in iTunes. And it didn't work. The software would load about 40 songs and then crash. This happened over and over again. I fiddled with it for hours and never got it to work properly.

So I brought the iPod mini to the Apple store. I also brought my laptop, in case they needed a demonstration of how much their software sucked. And this is when things started to look up. Not only did they fix my problem, but when the Apple guy noticed that my laptop's wireless reception alternated between sucky and nonexistent, he investigated and discovered that the wire running between my Airport card and the rest of the computer appeared to have shorted out. So the laptop went back to Apple. That was Monday.

On Friday the laptop got back.

Well, life is beautiful. My laptop works. My iPod mini works. I can do wireless internet easily and reliably for the first time in months. As proof, I am currently in my living room sitting in a comfy chair, blissfully--and wirelessly--posting to the internet.

I'm so grateful to Apple that I could slither moaning to the floor and writhe around in ecstacy. Sally Field's Oscar speech has nothing on it--this is straight out of Story of O. How I am loving the sweet surcease of my laptop torment. I could suck Apple's toes. Oooh, Apple--I'll bottom if you'll only laptop me. Oh, Apple, I am so lowly and thou art so great. Please sell me another overpriced flakey piece of computer hardware so that I might feel thy sharp lash and then the rush of orgasmic happiness when thou smilest on me and my computer hardware actually works the way it's supposed to.

Speaking of which, I badly want to browse--wirelessly, of course--over to the Apple website and buy myself a sexy piece of hardware.

So now I'm trying to decide whether I should be wasting my money on Apple's Extended Warranty. Because maybe I should be spending it on marriage counseling, instead.

p.s. Apple--just one more thing. Was it as good for you as it was for me?