Defective iPod Free To Good (Or Shitty) Home

Last evening, at approximately 8 p.m. EST, Lenny (my iPod) underwent the iPod-equivalent of open-heart surgery. At the advice of several nice computer-geeks at the Apple help-line, I performed a procedure on Lenny known as an HDD Scan. Buttons were pushed, screens flashed, and suddenly a new font appeared. Where once there should have been song titles, there were now categories labeled "5 to 1" and "A2D STAT."

They told me as soon as I described Lenny's problems that the prognosis did not look good....

"The operation will take anywhere between twenty and ninety minutes. By the end of that time, lines of text will appear," said Computer-Geek Number Two, "Write these lines down, and call us back. At that point, we'll have a better idea of how to proceed."


I'd like to take this moment to look back on my month with Lenny and remember all the times we shared. I'd like to think of the trips we took to museums together, with him crooning Nina Simone in my ears. The subway rides home at night as he soothed the stress of my day with Counting Crows or...well, whatever.

I'd like to do those things, but the truth is, Lenny has never actually been able to PLAY any music. Though I have spent hours attempting to fill his little iPod insides with all manner of music--Coldplay, Madonna, the theme from Fraggle Rock--he insists on merely showing me his small apple picture in indignant, white-plastic silence. Stubbornly. Incessantly. Hour after mute apple-screen hour.

To be fair, if the point of having an iPod is to always have a mini-picture of an apple with a bite taken out of it in your pocket, then I suppose Lenny rocks the house.

Say, for example, that I had some strange sort of fruit-amnesia, and needed constant reminders about the shapes of various fruits--

Well. No. Actually Lenny would be pretty useless then, too, because he really only does the ONE fruit. But I'd have that one fruit down pat. There'd be nooooo fooling me when it came to apples. Put a banana in front of me? Total confusion. Probably a lot of hand tremors and nervous ticking.

But, put an apple in front of me? Well...wait. Maybe not. Because if it didn't have a bite out of it, and I really did have fruit-amnesia, I'd probably still have no fucking idea what it was.

BUT, put an apple with a bite taken out of its right side in front of me, and I'd be all over that shit.

All thanks to Lenny.

My own little $400 fruit-amnesia insurance plan.

Awwwww yeah.

When all you guys whose iPods actually play music, get fruit-amnesia and totally lose your shit in the produce section, don't come running to me.

Because I'll be the girl rocking back and forth on the floor to your right, taking bites out of all the Granny Smiths and Golden Delicious, petting my own hair and murmuring through the falling bits of half-chewed pulp, "Apple, Lenny. Apple."

Jealous?

Thought so.

...

Well, anyway, ninety minutes after Computer Geek Number Two told me to run the HDD Scan, the following lines of text appeared on his screen, "HDD Scan FAIL. NG."

I called the Apple Geeks back. "It says that the HDD Scan failed," I told them somberly. "And right after the word "fail" it has an "N" and a "G." Does that mean something? Is that some sort of code?"

"'N.G.'," Geek Man explained, "It means 'No good.'"

Wow. Hi-tech.

So, yes. As I have suspected the entire time, Lenny is defective--or, in covert technical Apple-speak, "No good."

Thus,in an effort to help Lenny help himself, I have no choice but to do what any sensitive iPod parent would do. I am sending him back to Apple to go be with all the other PIECE OF TRASH DEFECTIVE REJECTS. And I'm making him wear a sign that says, "Deficient." And, until he leaves, I'm taunting him daily by putting him near my roommate's working iPod so that he feels extra bad and tries all the harder with his pathetic half-eaten apple picture.

It's really the caring thing to do.