Lulu, Fanny, and Simon

Oh, Steve. I felt a lot safer when you were around, even though I knew you were sick for years. I’ve written every published word of my life on one of your machines,  and I’ve gone from synching calendars, contacts, messages to life in the Icloud, where my data vanishes up into the sky. I’ve got all sorts of cool and stylishly designed cables hanging out of plugs all over the house and things ping all day.  I’ve always dreaded your passing, first because you were so exciting to follow, so anti-corporate and ferocious in your individuality, and for selfish reasons, because I always feared exactly what happened to me this week.

My Iphone went blank, taking all of my addresses and appointments with it, and my Ipad2 would not restore its data after absorbing Ios5, and my MacBook Pro would not receive e-mail, and then my main computer suddenly would not download  software updates from Apple World Headquarters and claimed I wasn’t connected to the Internet, which I surely was, and then froze and so I had all kinds of cool new machines that weren’t working for me, and to be honest, I was beginning to freak out, because my entire creative life and work was somewhere up in the ICloud and I couldn’t write, blog or e-mail and I was down here not able to get it. Suddenly, a life-long advocate of technology and creative, I had become a Luddite Poster Boy, a character in a Mary Shelley novel about the hubris of technology.  I tried calling Apple Tech Support,which has answered my calls for 25 years,  but they were overwhelmed with five million new phone users in love with Siri, the new personal assistant (I am in love with Siri and have not yet met her), and there were long waits, and then an atypically grumpy tech supporter (Steve, you would have strangled this guy, had you been around) said it was not the computer, but the Satellite company, and suddenly I was in Southeast Asia being told it was Apple, not them.

I hired an underground freelance satellite tech and he came after two days, took $100 and said he had no idea what was wrong and he knew nothing about Apple Computers. Maybe the router. Back to Apple. Not the router. I tried calling the Apple store, but you can no longer make an appointment on the phone, you have to go online, which is hard to when your computer can’t get online. I called up pretending to be a giant corporation (don’t care give the name) and I got right through and made an appointment with an annoyed sales rep who tried to send me off to the phone tree but I caught him.

The bottom line is this. I finally got to the Apple Store in Albany. They fixed my Iphone in two seconds, at no charge. I hauled my big desktop through the mall and used their T1 line to download my software. Found the bug in my MacBookPro. They were harried, brusque, reluctant. Overwhelmed. Everything is working now, and well, and I am loving my machines again. But Steve, I have always loved you, despite your well-documented flaws, and you have always taken care of me,  and I know you are up there raising hell and annoying angels and  using the afterlife software program you designed to keep an eye on things and filter mail from earth and I just read your biography, and I know that if this keeps up you will come down here and kick some corporate butt. I didn’t call Tech Support for 20 years, and now I can’t even call them on the phone. I know the bean counters will eventually turn Apple into just another company, but not now, not so soon, surely?

You have just recently passed, and I miss you already, and I feel a bit lonely down here.