about Harvey...

This entry should have been here this morning, when wild masses of international readers clicked their way through from Shauny's Mac Moron site. Harvey, her little iBook friend (700MHz/20GB/12inch) made it back home, healthy and in one happy piece.
So what happened and what did the story look like from my side of the screen?
Shauna's iBook died somewhere around the 4th of July. The symptoms that accompanied his death were too familiar. First there was this high fever, then there was the coma, then there were the casual blackouts, then there was the death. I hoped that Harvey could be just fixed in Scotland, where he and his incredibly gifted owner currently reside, but the estimate returned for the necessary repair was just obscene, dirty, an insult to any mac lover. The authorized Mac shop in Edinburgh charged Shauna £50 or so to tell her that the repair of her little white apple friend would cost £870! Absolute insanity. This is (according to the always "happy" captain euro) about $1,400... to have a computer repaired? Maybe?
This was not about to happen, my friends. Harvey did not travel from Taiwan to Australia to Singapore to Frankfurt to Edinburgh just to be fixed for an amount higher than the price of a new model...
I asked Tom if he knew a shop in London that could fix Harvey for les than, hmm... £300... He actually found some expert, who was willing to help, but then ended up not returning Shauna's calls. (thank you very much.)
This situation was just ridiculous. I asked Shauna to ship Harvey to New York, because here were at least two places where he could get help quickly and for less than the cost of a new computer.
Harvey arrived nicely wrapped, accompanied by a little diagnosis sheet a few days later. He was about as dead as they get. He did not want to start up, did not want to even make a sound. The screen remained blank...
At least for a little while. I have spent so many years dealing with macs, I know that it is sometimes important to just be nice to them to make them come back from the dead. I complimented Harvey on his shiny surface, the blinking lights on his bottom... connected him via firewire... pushed his big button and voilá, the screen went on and the little computer opened up to me completely, showing me the content of his harddrive. (Attention users of osX, Jaguar: If you think that anything on your hard drive is protected by this "password" you use for a log-in... think again. You are just one of the folders on the drive when it boots up in target mode... the only thing that will protect you is the discrete nature of the visitor... I did not look at any files...) I powered down harvey, wrapped him back into his protective envelope and decided to bring him to Tekserve, the trusted name in Apple repairs, since before there was an Apple store in SoHo.
I arrived at Tekserve during my lunch break on the next day. My number was 84, I waited for about 30 minutes or so, just to be called in to sit across from a guy who really tried hard to look as if he knew what he was doing. Harvey did not like him at all. The iBook did not start, it did not make a sound, the "expert" created an info-sheet based on my description of the issues... He then told me that the repair would cost $360... this was the standard fee applied to all repairs that needed to be sent back to apple. I asked him if it would be cheaper for me to bring the computer directly to Apple.... and he told me that yes, this would be about 50-60 dollars less... Ahem... what an honest soul... hmm...
I signed a waiver that confirmed that I refused to have the computer repaired on 23rd street... Next stop would be the Genius Bar at the Apple store in SoHo.
(As I was walking out the door, there was a little mountain of "Harveys" (exactly the model) for $800 each... check that out, Scottish repair man...
A day later, in a different setting, we found ourselves on the second floor of the nicely smelling Apple Store. Left and right from us were parents with their little Harveys, as dead as my little buddy... same symptoms, same panic mode...
The young lady who's iBook looked more dead than dead let me go ahead of her, as I was a bit in a hurry and the Genius I got to talk to was Pax. Pax means peace, of course, and this Apple Genius was really very relaxed and not worried about things... was he a real genius? would he be able to heal Harvey?... To my great surprise... well, not a great surprise, but still, Harvey just started up. It took a tiny while, some little spinning action, a few minutes of this, a few seconds of that and Pax and I were looking at Shauna's log in screen. This is where I realised that I did not know the password. I felt as if I had stolen the computer, dragged it here and wanted to perform some apple laundry scheme... Did I mentioned that Pax appeared very relaxed throughout the procedure?... When I told him that I did not have the password... (among other things... I did a lot of nervous talking...) he just typed something on the keyboard once... twice... and then simply stated: "Oh, it was ••••••• how funny."... (Did I hear an angel choir sing hallelujah? did the "genius" logo glow? Not sure, but this Pax guy was indeed an Apple genius.) How funny indeed, this guy needed just two tries to get into Shauna's private space, on a computer which looked all bright eyed and bushy tailed to all of us. Pax, the genius, did not want to accept an obviously healthy machine. He gave me some time to crash Harvey, while he brought away some left overs from some other customer...
I tried really hard to crash Harvey right there at the genius bar, I really tried... I wanted him to break into sweat, to break down in Photoshop, to go blank, do at least pretend to be dead...just for a minute or two? Please?
He only fell asleep... nothing spectacular enough to have him stay the night at his secret home in SoHo...
Pax created a case number for me, to make things easier once I had to call 1-800-APL-CARE, the place where he would have sent Harvey anyway.
I took the little iBook home with me again. Turned him on...
dead.

I must have been the first caller at 1-800-APL-CARE the next day. The dude on the other side of the line gave me the slowest tech support experience of my life. He was so quiet, apparently staring blankly at his screen?, that I suggested that there should be some sort of sound, letting me know that he was still there...
"I hear a sound..." he replied...
allrighty then... he had my case number, I knew the resurrection of Harvey would cost $299, so what was his problem?...
I spent 30 Minutes listening to him do something close to nothing. His conclusion was that harvey had a broken LCD... I repeatedly had to tell him that the iBook sometimes happened to start up fine, with a shiny, beautifully bright display... silence...
He prepared me for a number which would be the price for the repair... we waited in silence for another few minutes... "$690"...
Oh, comoooon.... I asked him if he would mind to take a second look at that calculation and if there could be any shadow of a chance that the special $299 fee applied to this kind of incident... silence...
"In this particular case..."... he paused... "you might be right..."

Harvey's ambulance arrived on the day of the blackout. It was a very nice fresh brown box, it contained a little room made especially for harvey, he also got a little pink sleeping bag. All I had to do was put him into that compartment, close the box, using enclosed stickers, remove the shipping label, revealing the return address in Memphis... and just give it back to the AirExpress guy...
Supersimple...
I was not sure where Harvey stayed during the 2003 blackout... he definitely made it to the repair center in Memphis, then to the Apple Store in SoHo (apparently sharing the ride with some other happy macs?) and was then sent to me...
Healthy, happy, resurrected.
There was a little note enclosed, stating that real Apple technicians were able to fix harvey by exchanging three real Apple-parts... A bill would follow in a few days...
I should probably knock on imitation wood now and hope that the Apple dude on the phone actually managed to put Harvey into the $299 emergency procedure slot...
I shipped Harvey back to Scotland on the following day, last friday. The friendly people at Mail Boxes Etc. on Broadway and 96th got a real kick out of Harvey's story. In order to save Shauna from the burden of improper taxation, the lady at the store wrote a mini letter outlining what had happened to harvey and how he had been manufactured in Taiwan, bought in Australia and was now returning to his owner in Scotland. This would have been a simple happy ending to my side of the Harvey story... had he not tried to make another funny intercontinental jump. Apparently addicted to travel by now, Harvey faked a little mini trip to Shanghai, via Alaska... but only for a few hours. Despite of "delays" in China, he was able to get back to New York, just on time to be shipped to England, where he spent a day on a truck, celebrating a british bank holiday on Monday...

So now Harvey is back in Edinburgh, he is a little helper to Shauna. I am certain that he is happier now, having traveled pretty much completely around the world, at least virtually...
I wish I had had a little camera to show you all the places Harvey saw, at least under my watch (nothing dirty, just pure Apple fun...) but that's a completely different story... and we shall continue it some other time...
: )