Thursday, January 15, 2009

iMage to the rescue? iPod Touch troubles

A co-worker was bummed out today, because she and her daughter had been trying for days to get the girl's iPod touch working. It seems that it stopped responding one day, when she tried to sync it, and calls to Apple support eventually resulted in being advised to take it to a Genius, with a caveat that even those hardy souls may not be able to bring the machine back from the dead. The closest Genius, however, is 60 miles away. The young iPod owner was so distraught over the device's apparent demise that she had been losing sleep (I fully understand!); throwing another $400 after the first bundle wasn't really an option. So what do you do when you're in this position and you see your PC support technician strolling down the hallway? Well, duh, you grab me--I mean her--and ask her if she knows anything about iPods.

I, of course, have extensive experience with iPod Touches, having had an iPhone for nearly three whole months and having been through the reset/jailbreak/awwcrapdoitalloveragain stage at least six times or seven times. Oh, wait, I mean I hesitantly told my co-worker that I knew something about iPods, wondering if I was lying. It took me a while to figure out that the multi-talented device was just stuck in recovery mode; you see, for the longest time, my iPhone has been showing me a drawing of Steve Jobs when it's in restore mode, and I must admit I had to resort to a YouTube video (embedded below) to confirm my suspicions. But, hey, being a good tech doesn't mean I know it all; it means I know where to get answers when I don't know enough. And it means that I got to show my co-worker the iPod's colorful home screen; hopefully it also means there's a young'un somewhere smiling tonight because of me.