parents and electronics
Today I took my parents to the Sprint store in the mall to get our phones upgraded. It took them 1/2 an hour to decide on the phone (my mother’s single criterion being how easy the buttons are to push, and my father’s that it would take a beating), and it took the Sprint people 1.5 hours to do all the paperwork for a new phone plan and phone upgrades. Soooo much paperwork! The actual technology is so simple…but the organizational requirements of a big company like Sprint add a lot of logistical problems.
Anyway, as we were waiting for the poor Sprint store workers to get through to some main Sprint base, I took my dad to the Apple store. He’s been going to the gym a few times a week (shaming me terribly :-p when your 65 yr old dad works out more than you do, you know it’s time to reorganize your life), and wants to be able to listen to his music while on the exercise bike.
I thought something like a nano would be good for him, since he could just link it with itunes and not worry about organizing his music. When we got to the store, though, we encountered 2 problems.
1) electronics have now become TOO small. He wanted something as physically big as the 80 Gig ipod, but he only needs 4 gigs of space, max.
2) Apple gives you so much bullshit in order to enforce copywrite law. My dad got so confused by the fact that you can only upload to the ipod, not download from it, and that you have to sync your ipod with your itunes library, necessarily located on one computer. Confusion aside, this system really is extremely inconvenient. Unless you’re very very careful, it’s too easy to lose your entire library. Only being able to get your music from one computer is also really annoying. We decided we were too good for proprietary constraints, so we’ll buy from someone else :-p
So 2 hours at the mall, and I came out with a new cell and 300 text messages/month. It should not have been that hard.
