There’s a reason I buy Apple products. This afternoon I was reminded of that reason: Apple Support! Human beings who get on the phone with you and connect their terminal with yours and take your sweaty little paw and lead you through the maze to freedom.
Lots of batsh!t things happen when you use computers, Indeed, minor batsh!ttery is a routine, daily affair. But today? The entire damn FLOCK of bats escaped from the cave and spent the afternoon banging around the Funny Farm!
So…I’m just putting the finishing touches on the last article in this quarter’s Latina studies journal. The contents are stored in a single folder on the Mac, and this folder holds about a dozen subfolders. Each of these holds three files: the original unedited file, a file with all the edits showing in their full bloody glory, and a file with the edits “accepted” in Wyrd’s “track changes” function, so only queries to the author and editors leap out at the reader. We return the “Clean” file and the “Edits” file to the client.
At last I go to save this final, interminable article to disk, so that I can upload the whole passel of them to the editor on DropBox. As I hit “COMMAND-S,” my fingers slip on the keyboard and…POOF! The file disappears.
WTF?
As I start to search for it, I find it’s not just the file that’s disappeared: IT’S THE ENTIRE GODDAMN FOLDER FOR THE ENTIRE GODDAMN JOURNAL! Yes. That does mean 15 subfolders containing a total of 45 files, some of them thousands of words long.
Frantically, I try to find it. Word will not bring it up with “open recent” or any other such maneuver. It has utterly disappeared from DropBox. It’s not in “Documents.” It’s not in “Trash.” It’s not on the desktop. My external hard drive is not connected to the laptop and so Time Machine has made no backup. Doesn’t matter anyway, ’cause TM hasn’t been working for the past several weeks.
I am beside myself.
With some difficulty, I call up Apple’s support techs — their website will not accept my copied-and-pasted serial number, and it takes some doing to force the damn system to accept enough data that I can put in a ticket.
What a nightmare.
Shortly, this delightful woman calls. Though transparently mystified, she is not fazed.
To make a modestly long story short, we finally found the folder through a route she knew how to evoke, though even that took some doing. And we discovered that somehow Wyrd had renamed the journal’s folder, giving it the title of the last file I’d worked on.
Because my first- and second-level Dropbox directories are numbered (so they’ll appear in the order I want, not the alphabetical order we are asked to accept) and lower-level files have a word or a name as a filename, sans numbering, this meant the journal’s directory had disappeared from among the numbered folders and dropped down into the alphabetically listed files…far, far from its normal place. And it was misnamed. I would never have found it if she hadn’t known how to make it appear and how to track it back to where it was stored.
With this issue of the journal, Wyrd mysteriously started auto-creating complete backup files. When I first saw these things pop up out of nowhere, I thought oh damn, something ELSE to have to fiddle with! I was going to delete the things, because my computer has more than enough clutter, thank you. But for reasons unknown, I failed to do so. Instead I created a folder called “Redundancies,” into which I moved these “backup” files.
Well, we found that long before we found the lost folder. So that meant I would have been able to rebuild most of the lost work. Wouldv’e taken a day or two, no doubt, and plenty of cussing. But at least not everything was lost.
Ugh. If I had been stuck with trying to get someone from the Geek Squad to help me untangle a mess like that in Microsoft, I would’ve been shit out of luck. At best, it would take days or even a couple of weeks to resolve the problem — if it could be resolved. But meanwhile, we’re running late: I’ve had this copy almost a month. Holy mackerel!
So I can say with all seriousness that the customer support is the reason I buy Apple products. Yes, they cost a lot more than PCs. Yes, they accomplish about the same thing. But nowhere else do you get 100% full-blown seriously-wanna-help-stick-with-it-till-the-problem’s-fixed live customer support.