Stephen Yeargin

I should be writing this on my Mac mini. But I am not. It should have all of my data restored from Time Machine, snapped back in time to just before the hard disk drive failed. But it does not. My fairly expensive, midrange computer hyped as fantastic because “it just works” should be back at its regular duties of checking e-mail, browsing the Internet and occasionally doing things semi-productive. But it is not.

Instead, I am staring at a grey screen with an Apple logo and a gear. It is how have I have spent the last half hour or so since getting home with the freshly repaired machine. Believe it or not, it could be worse.

I could have arrived home with Mr. Steve W. of Clarksville’s much newer Mac mini. At least, that is the computer that I had in my possession for thirty minutes while driving down West End Avenue away from the Green Hills Apple Store. I had waited a while in the store for the associate to retrieve my computer from the back so that I could be on my way back home. I was then presented with a Mac mini (they all look alike) and a sheet to sign off the repairs. I carefully reviewed the document and seeing that all was in order I signed the sheet. They took that copy and handed me the computer and two documents stapled together and out the door I went.

Samantha was driving and I had the computer in my lap with these documents. I was pleased with the turnaround time given the holiday, and was fairly confident that the machine would have OS X 10.5.1 installed (as the Genius had said) and that I would be able to migrate my backups from Time Machine as soon as it started. The problem with that equation came down to page two of those stapled documents. As was reviewing what all had been replaced, I saw that it listed an 80 GB hard drive and the logic board. Surprised, I read further to see that it was an Intel Core Duo logic board in the machine. My machine is from the pre-Intel era, running a PowerPC chip. I checked the serial number on the bottom, and it did not match the top copy.

“Turn around.”

I called and let the store know that they should avoid sending Mr. Steve W. home with a computer until I got there. The operator said that she would let the manager know about the mix-up. I mention my rather amusing situation to the associates at the front of the store, and get an escort back to the scene. The woman who had retrieved the computer the first time, not surprisingly, did not look happy to see me. After the manager met me at the back, they went off to look for my computer. I started to grow concerned when it took a while for them to emerge from the back room. When they finally did and a few apologies later, one was sent back to their tech area to retrieve the original piece of paper I had signed, as there was a bit of confusion on whether I should sign again for the computer. Samantha says I should have been at least irritated enough to get a gift card. No dice.

Now a few hours later, I am that irritated. I setup the computer again to discover that they had reloaded the machine with “Tiger” instead of “Leopard”. The whole idea was that I could quickly restore the system from Time Machine. I cannot do that from Tiger. So, I went ahead and tried to do a system restore using the Leopard boot disk. Now it just will not boot at all, hanging at the aforementioned gray screen with the Apple icon and the spinning gear.

I have work tomorrow, so if I cannot get things to work, Samantha has graciously volunteered to layeth the smack down tomorrow on her day off in Green Hills. It seems to make her happy. I wonder how things would have went had I arrived home and not even realized that I had someone else’s computer. I have to have a bit of sympathy for the poor sap that would have had to call Steve and I to let us know that our computers had been swapped.

In summary: Macs are fantastic machines (until they break).