This year Scott and I are having a Halloween party, an attempt to get together all our Bay Area friends and/or an excuse to bake black and orange cupcakes. That means having to put actual thought and effort into costumes (in years past we’ve stumbled to showings of Rocky Horror in the semi-nude, or simply celebrated with the arrival of sex toys). I’m being Joan from Mad Men. Anyone who has seen this sassy, majorly curvy redhead in action — and by action, I may or may not mean in that episode where she’s not wearing a shirt — will understand.

Scott, however, was having a harder time thinking of an outfit. In brainstorming with him, I came up with a number of highly inappropriate options that would have, even if they scared away our guests, endlessly entertained yours truly:

1) A sex machine. Take a cardboard box, spray paint it silver, hot glue an extension cord to the back and a low-quality dildo to the front. Tada!

2) Lolita and Humbert Humbert. Yes, I am currently Lolita obsessed. No, it wouldn’t be hard to get a female friend with chestnut hair and honey skin to put on a pink, pleated dress and carry a tennis racket while looking fiery yet broken. Wait, am I a bad person?

3) The Marquis de Sade. Choose your own adventure! Slim and fine-featured? Go with early Sade, handsome, effeminate, aristocratic. Hoping for something a little less refined? Try later Sade. Just stuff a few pillows into an oversized, French Revolution era pants and shirt combo and spend the evening furiously scribbling something lewd.

What ever you are this Halloween, here’s hoping it’s a great one — filled with flirtation, fun, and fun-sized candy. Enjoy the inappropriate while it’s appropriate!

As an assignment for my Lolita class (yes, I have an entire class on Lolita, and yes, it makes me exceedingly happy), I’ve been keeping a dream diary as part of the “Dunne Experiment.” In 1927 aeronautical engineer J. W. Dunne published An Experiment with Time, a treatise in which he claimed that dreams not only reflected backward but also forward, a “fact” confirmed by his long history of seeing in the night things that had yet to occur. To test out this claim, Dunne suggests noting down your dreams, then considering what events in the days after you dream them could have inspired them.

Sure, it’s wacky, but 1) Nabokov dug it for its aestheticizing approach to real life, i.e. reading your dreams and experiences as if they were texts and 2) who doesn’t secretly want to figure out that they’re dreaming of the future? Here are some excerpts from the report of my results…

—

1) On September 29th I dreamt I was on a white boat out in a turbulent, navy blue sea with my uncle and my husband, Scott. Scott and I climbed in the water, floating (as if wearing life jackets) around a flat, white diamond with a small square of red at its center that sat on the surface on the water. A line of something like string connected to its underside stretched down into the depths, invisible to us at the surface. This seemed like a kind of sport, like kite flying plunged into the ocean.

If this dream had occurred after October 3rd, when I started using my membership at a club at the Berkeley marina, I would have called it a convoluted interpretation of windsurfing, complete with the water, the life jackets, the sense of being tossed around in the waves, the sail transformed into a water kite (or perhaps, since it was white and flat, a board), maintaining the impression of using wind for motion.

2) Also on September 29th I dreamt that I was at a large outdoor concert at dusk with friends from undergraduate school. My friend Mike, sitting with me in the concrete bleachers, pointed to an entranceway behind us and told me to watch out for our friend Fiona, whom he said he wouldn’t recognize except for “her baby face.” Soon a tall, bulky drag queen with tan gray skin emerged from the spot (Fiona, in theory, done up, though looking nothing like herself), her gray hair in beehive, her red lips the only color in the scene. She sings in a low, serious voice, then spots up in the audience, waves, and breaks into her normal soprano.

If this dream had occurred after October, 5th, when we discussed transvestitism in the performance of femininity in Lolita class, I would have said it was inspired by our comments on how the women of the novel put on a form of drag (there being a woman in my dream as a man playing a woman).

3) On October 14th I dreamt that I was taking a flat escalator, like a conveyor belt, across a stretch of open water to a series of thin platforms, large boards sitting on the surface of the still, turquoise sea, which would be taking me on some sort of journey. I was standing on the shore, a low outcropping on compacted snow that was melting and crumbling under my feet in the sunlight, while I held in my arms mounds of items – poorly packed luggage, perhaps. Counselors from the camp where I spent my summers growing up lined the platforms.

If this dream had occurred after October 19th I would have chalked it up to a conversation I had with a friend about a “mini Burning Man” held entirely on boats, houseboats, etc. on a nearby river. This weekend retreat, the logistical details of which I’m still unclear on, appeared to me instantly – from my friend’s description – as a sort of floating gypsy camp, made of rafts tied together and in the middle of the river (though when I think about it, it makes more sense the boats would have been tied down on an encampment at the shoreline). It had a lively, communal, camp atmosphere, full of twenty-somethings like the counselors on the platforms in my dream.

Examples like these left me intrigued, at least initially. Given Dunne’s observation that people were often incapable of identifying the obvious ties between dreams and future events (interestingly similar to the trouble patients have in seeing links between trauma histories and their sexual fantasies in Brett Kahr’s Who’s Been Sleeping In Your Head?) I thought that, though I hadn’t experienced that eerie “I’ve seen this before” feeling lately, maybe I’d recorded ties deeper than I’d realized. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, a much more reasonable, highly likely explanation turned up to override the notion of imagining the future.

1) Was my dream of the “water kite,” unstuck in time, inspired by my windsurfing expedition a few days later? It seems unlikely. I already knew I would be windsurfing that weekend when I had the dream. To make the case even less likely, I had been planning on joining the windsurfing club for months and already had years of experience as a windsurfer. In addition, as keeping the Dunne diary confirmed, imagery water and boats appears regularly in my dreams.

2) Though I have no “normal” explanation for this dream, the causal link between our transvestitism discussion and the image of my friend as a drag queen feels tenuous. Though the two appear to have much in common, as visual “scenes” they share nothing. One is a memory of sitting in a classroom lit by yellow light spliced a thought of Charlotte Haze in a black evening dress, the other a smoky gray twilight scene with a figure of femininity who looked instead, when I think more closely, like a statue I saw in Tahoe this past spring of a bear dressed in a vibrant puffy dress (like the one worn by the Chicita Banana woman), fruit similarly stacked on its head, standing on its hind legs, striking a comely pose, its pursed lips painted a bright and striking red.

3) It seems much more likely that my dream of the water platforms shaped my visualization of the boat retreat than the other way around. Logically, my image of a gypsy encampment floating downstream makes no sense for a weekend get-together of a few hundred people. I’m sure, if I asked my friend for photos, I would see that the reality bears little resemble to either of the images I conjured in my mind.

Though I’ve enjoyed keeping my Dunne diary, I can’t say my results have lived up to my hopes. At the least, perhaps Nabokov would be pleased to hear that keeping this record has allowed me to start looking at my dreams, if not my life, in a more aestheticized way. Like tracing a thread through a literary text, I’ve begun to see patterns in my mental activity, topics and places that emerge again and again each night. Though I may not be conjuring up images the future, at least I know what’s coming for me in my sleep.

The Beatles: Rock Band addiction, like all good addictions, has begun with anti-social behavior and healthy dose of cultural critique. Instead of going out with friends this past Saturday night, my husband Scott and I stayed home to crack open our latest purchase. I’ve been a Beatles fan since I was old enough to crawl toward the play button on a CD player (so, like, the age of 14), and Scott has been boning up on the oeuvre in preparation for the game. Five hours later and nearly a decade of pivotal rock albums later, a few observations emerged:

1) Ooh, it’s pretty! From the intro to the menus to the newly buffed and sparkling on-screen notes, Beatles: Rock Band is lovely. (This would be the appropriate place for song lyric references slipped in, wouldn’t it, like how the whole things shines like Lucy in the sky with diamonds, but my favorite tunes are the dark and strange ones, and nothing in this review quite screams “I am the walrus”).

2) Hey, Beatles songs! Yes, that’s obvious, but it really is a pleasant surprise every time I advance through the story mode to uncover more songs I actually know and like. Take that, 80% of all songs on all previous music games.

3) I am staring a bunch of men. Attractive men. For hours. And the people staring with me, they’re all women. Gender commentary hungry as I am, it’s of course this last observation I want to talk abut.

Music games have never been the most explicit of genres, but they’ve still given us — and by “us” I mean the same ol’ implicitly male player — our fair share of beautiful women to gaze upon. Rock Band 2 for the Xbox 360, for example, with its character creation options, allows you to make scantily dressed rock starlets along with rock stars. Thanks to a particularly creative friend, our copy even has a topless, rockin’ Ada Lovelace. True, for the most part, the eyes of a participant stay on the notes/words, not the on-screen bodies, but they’re there, and emphasizing their watched-ness are the crowds of fans cheering them on.

Beatles: Rock Band, by contrast, has no female avatars to strip down and hand a guitar. There’s Paul, John, George, and Ringo: dressed, slightly cartoonish, but handsome nonetheless. The audience, at least in the early gigs before concert venues melt into studio recording sessions, has transformed from a gyrating mass of coed music lovers to a swarm of screaming, swooning young girls — each with identical faces and dark, glossy eyes. We watch The Fab Four sing to us about love, and along with us peers a female gaze full of longing several thousand strong.

Where does this leave the presumed player? Does his male gaze become a female one as his viewing of these four attractive men gets elided with that of the all-girl audience? At the same time the game links him to the Beatles themselves as he — or she — plays the same notes as Paul or John. On the one hand we’re back at the old transvestitism debate. On the other, we have a new way of regarding Beatles: Rock Band, with its feminine aesthetic and cross-gender appeal: as a distinctly female game that challenges the male gaze at the same time it presents us with a stereotypical division between the musical talent of men and the historical fandom of women who can do little more than scream along.

For straight boys, for example, it’s a numbers game. Simply by existing as a woman on the site I receive a handful of unsolicited messages each day. Write something coherent, interesting, and personalized or cute and chances are you’ll rise above the crowd. Women may seem like sphinx-like enigmas — waiting to consume you, nom nom — but in fact we’re all waiting for you to write us about how much you like tofu sculptures (like ice sculptures, get it?)… at least, I am.

Message: “Hello! I’m not a couple, but I do love (a) vegetarian restaurants and (b) to bite people. How did you pick up on that from my profile? The little floating robot thinks we both like neutral milk hotel and by god he is correct, WELL DONE FLOATING ROBOT.”
Earned points for: This boy I “poked” first, but he’s the one who put out this brief but adorable, funny message. I can tell that, at least in internet land, our senses of humor match up nicely.

Message: “You seem like a colorful and fun person who I would like to be friends with. I live in the Sacramento area, but I do frequent the bay area once and awhile on weekends… So hopefully I didn’t talk your eyes off… hmmm…that doesn’t sound as good as I thought it would. Anyway, I hope that this message finds you in good spirits and that we might have a conversation soon.”
Earned points for: Tons of personal detail (not included here, to protect, as a voice from Nick-at-Night’s Dragnet will always say in my mind, the innocent), a bubbly personality, the willingness to be kooky.

Message: “:-)”
Earned points for: Brevity, confidence, huggability. Admittedly, this sort of message really only says, “Hey, you look cool. Check out my profile.” But if that profile is equally fun and appealing, it works.

Message: “Puppies!”
Earned points for: My profile used to mention, in the “I spend a lot of time thinking about” category, something along the lines of “sex… or puppies.” I’m a sucker for my own tactics, apparently, because this tidbit of a message made me way too happy.

Message: “Hiya! Saw you on my stalkers list. It’s handy! Thought you and your profile were cute and interesting… I used to live in SF for two years, and since I was vegetarian that whole time, I have a few suggestions… ps. welcome to the City!”
Earned points for: Casual, friendly premise for writing, personable, enthusiastic, but down-to-earth tone.

Message: “Hey, I like board games and steampunk and…
um, we might need to be friends.”
Earned points for: This is exactly the kind of message I would send someone. Well done! Hmm, this is like how I think curvy redheads are cute, isn’t it?

However, I can’t say I’m enjoying Bookwork on the iPhone. It’s not that Popcap, diligent as always, has gotten anything wrong with the app. In fact, it’s its sheer usability that’s bumming me out. I can — and do — start up a new game every time I have two minutes at the bus stop, thirty seconds in the coffee shop line. This should be a good thing; it means Bookworm is easy to start and stop, as well as generally addictive. Unfortunately, in having so much access tothe game, and in tiny snippets, I’m getting a much less satisfying play experience.

What I miss is the separate space of play — of having to sit down at my computer (or even better, in front of a console) and decide to start up the game, forsaking all other windows, all other tasks. This made Bookworm feel like a special activity, a treat, contained in its own (oh dear, I’m going to say it) magic circle. Mobile gaming breaks the magic circle into shards, making it permeable, accessible, but also less, well, magical.

iPhone games aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and certainly the world of the future — have I mentioned all the emails I send via my phone are signed “Sent from THE FUTURE”? –deserves quick play moments to fill morning commutes. Still, I hope that as the video game industry progresses from the macro to the micro we remember the immersive experience of setting time and space aside to play, instead of letting that magic disappear into our everyday lives.. even if that magic is as simple as the feeling of success when a green, nearsighted worm chomps down on my occasional six-letter word.

Message: “Though I’m far away I would very much love to hear from you. As you said it’s good to hear from fellow kinksters. I feel like I’m the only one where I am… See if you want to chat maybe after reading my profile. I’d love to hear from you.”
Mistake: Though this user gets points for sharing my interests and having read my profile (I mention welcoming shout-outs from “fellow friendly pervs”) the fact that he lives 1,997 miles away — and that I’m not currently looking for cybersex research partners — means he’d have to blow me out of the interweb water for me to even read his profile.

Message: “just read and enjoyed your profile. definately a fan of spanking, calling naughty, name calling, pinning your wrists down, etc. oh wow. used to be totally into cyber stuff too, though haven’t done it in awhile. hope you’re havin a fun night.”
Mistake: Okay, in my profile I do come right out and say I’m a bi, poly sub, but read more carefully, OKC-goers: under “looking for” I don’t list random hookups. Even if I did, I’d take it as a red flag that you jump right into the a la carte sex menu before even introducing yourself.

Message: “So interesting professional skill you’ve got there, cybersex. I’m still working at it. HA! Hows it going? So I”m curious what your looking for on here since it looks like your married?”
Mistake: Call me a hypocrite — or just a sex writer wary of sex — but this comes on too strong as well. Let’s bond over how adorable Welsh corgi puppies are or something before we come to the mutual understanding that first and foremost what you want is to get into my pants.

Message: “Hi there! How are you this morning? saw your profile and thought i’d say hello. Have you been a member here on okc long? I’ve been on for a few months, but its not working as well i hoped it would. Anyways, i read through your profile and noticed that you are poly.. I am as well.. So i thought i’d look around on here and set up a group of poly friends to get to know. So if you’re interested, or just up for a good chat, send me a message sometime :p hope to hear from you!”
Mistake: There’s nothing particularly striking here — beyond the fact that this user is also poly and lives in my city — but to be frank the deciding factor wasn’t the content of his message, it was his photos. I didn’t find him attractive. Cruel? I’m hoping it’s more like honest.

Message: “I just wanted to drop by and say hi (which it appears I accomplished). I am quite new to the city (moved here from Iowa about 5 months ago) and am always in search of new, awesome people to hang out with. A little about me; I am a fun, energetic, and intelligent human being… While a relationship that was something more then friends would always be welcome I am basically looking for new friends at the time… If I sound like someone you would like to get to know please send me a message back.”
Mistake: While this is a sweet, endearingly vulnerable message — three full paragraphs in its full form — it’s the equivalent of a form letter. How many people did this nice young man send it to? You wouldn’t do it when applying for a job so don’t do it to me, buddy. But, you know, good luck with the friends and stuff.

Also excellent is this tiny “Choose Your Own Predicament Game.” Sub, would you like your Ma’am to cane you? Paddle you? Spoon you? Pick wisely and see where the two-second adventure takes you. Then sit around and contemplate games that resist the act of play, like I’m doing! Because I’ve only been in a PhD program for two months and already I’ve become that grad student.

Message: “hey fellow perv just dropping a line, i knwo you wont respond but at least had to try, good luck.”
Mistake: Grammar, punctuation, spelling, general laziness, too much self-deprecation, no photo (which just screams middle-aged and scraggly). I certainly don’t mind being called a “fellow perv,” but at least do it with competency.

Message: “How are you? Wanna chat?”
Mistake: Brief is different than meaningless. Give me something, anything to work with, buddy.

Message: “i don’t know why…but you remind me a lot of gilian anderson, aka dana skully from the x-files. i kind of dig the paranormal.”
Mistake: Ok, as a recovering X-Files geek, I take this as an actual compliment. If only the person sending it had a photo. Or the ability to hit the shift key.

Message: “hey, third eye blind is not only from San Francisco, but they are pretty darn groovy. I’m diggin’ your approach to this life of ours. Nicely done, miss.”
Mistake: Third Eye Blind, which I mention liking in my profile as the most embarrassing thing I’m willing to admit to, is in fact not groovy. Nor should anyone use that word. Ever. Another phrase that should never be uttered: “I’m diggin’ your approach to this life of ours.”

Message: “so you like to have sex then? , is that what your saying is what mind thinks., dunno how’s life and whats the color of your sky?”
Mistake: This is somewhere between transparent and insane. My synesthesia is not an excuse to message me without a command of the English language.

Message: “nice to meet some one that enjoys sex as much as I do. If you want to hang out and get knocked around and fucker in all your holes I would love to be the one to do so ;) I’m a nice Irish guy that likes to have a lot of fun in the bedroom. Let me know if I interest you :)”
Mistake: Are you a nice Irish guy? Are you really? Because somehow I’m just not buying it.

Insanity, the classic gothic trope of cinema and literature alike, makes our spines tingle specifically because it hits close to home. Those we see as “crazy” in art are not monsters, not impossibilities from beyond the grave, but flesh and blood human beings who vary from the norm in plausible and thus unnerving ways. Arkham Asylum’s first and biggest failing comes in the missed opportunity to spook us out with (putting aside the possibility of making us think meaningfully about) with the uncanny. Instead we’re confronted with familiar Batman villains, inhuman goons, and the generically committed.

Also not doing the game any favors in the uneasy ambiance department: the game’s graphics. I would have much preferred a simpler, more stylized aesthetic, perhaps influenced by Batman: The Animated Series, which would have allowed the atmosphere to remain ripe for stealth without the over attention to detail, which is currently derailing the visual experience of navigating Arkham. Batman does earn points for one type of uncanniness: the uncanny valley of its stilted, “realistic” characters. I could go on a boating expedition up the Congo in the creases in the Dark Knight’s face. And who thought it was a good idea to have us watch 90% of the game from behind a rippling black cape, an impossible feat of rendering?

At its brief, best moments, Batman: Arkham Asylum reminds me of Bioshock — as voiceovers from the Joker flood in through padded walls. At its worst, or I should say its most mediocre, it feels like an excellent game that could have been. Maybe other players, less eager to turn a corner and see deranged doctors performing sadistic cosmetic surgery, will be content with the gameplay. I for one was let down again and again by the lack of insanity in this house of the insane.

In mid-August of this year I turned on my iPod nano (purchased 6/08 and still under AppleCare) to discover a thin, black vertical line running through the screen. The next day I power cycled the iPod, hoping the line would go away. In its place were two such black lines. This was troubling, since the device was in good condition, well cared for, and hadn’t suffered any damage — never dropped, had anything spilled on it, etc.

When the lines had not gone away two weeks later, on September 1st, I called AppleCare and spoke with Dorian, who troubleshot with me, surmised that the problem was a hardware glitch, said he was putting a note in the system that the iPod should be replaced, and gave me the case ID number D25594610. I would have taken the device to the San Francisco Apple store to have it replaced in person, but my husband, who bought it for me as a birthday present, had had it engraved, and Dorian let me know that in order to replicate that engraving I’d have to send the current iPod into the AppleCare center, which would then issue a new iPod that would get sent to Asia to get engraved before coming back to me, and that the entire process should take about two weeks. I agreed this was the best option, and Dorian sent me a box to ship back my current iPod to the AppleCare center.

A few days later I received my pre-paid Fedex box, and a day or two after that my husband sent off my old iPod. By September 8th it had been received by the AppleCare center. At 9:37 am I received an email letting me know the device had arrived. By 12:37 pm I received a second email claiming that the device had been has been “inspected by Apple technicians, who have determined that it has been subjected to accidental damage or misuse, which is not covered by the warranty or an Apple service contract. Therefore your product is being returned to you unrepaired. You should expect to receive it within two business days along with a letter that gives details of this assessment.” Below this information was listed my correct San Francisco shipping address.

When I had not received my iPod by 9/20, twelve days later, I got worried. I called AppleCare that night, a Sunday, to figure out what had happened. I spoke to an operator who told me he couldn’t speak to the issue, that I had to call back and speak to someone Monday through Friday (information I found out the next day was incorrect) and that, according to the system, the device had never even left the AppleCare facility.

As per his instructions, I called back on Monday, 9/21 and spoke to Jennifer in Idaho, who gave me a very different story. She said that the device had indeed been shipped out and delivered back to me on 9/8, the very day it was supposed to have arrived and been assessed, at 8:41 am, i.e. before either 9/8 AppleCare email had even been sent to me. Upon expressing concern – I had, after all, definitely not received my returned iPod – Jennifer looked into the shipping address, which was in fact not my apartment in San Francisco, but an unknown location in Elk Grove, California, some hour or two outside of the city, which it had been signed for by a J Cornell. She provided me with a tracking number, 499 025805 554.

This was even more concerning. Who was J Cornell? Had the iPod been signed for by a stranger and stolen? If so, how had the return address been changed? Jennifer said she didn’t know, but that theft was a very real possibility, and that AppleCare wouldn’t take responsibility in that instance. Could J Cornell be someone in my apartment building’s leasing office, she wondered (possible, though it wouldn’t explain the address change)? Or perhaps something got mixed up in the AppleCare warehouse. Just in case, she gave me a new case number, 136759189, for a possible warehouse mix-up. Either way, she said, I would have to take up the issue with Fedex. She gave me their customer service number and wished me luck.

On 9/22, now convinced that my iPod was not only broken – that issue having taken a backseat to its disappearance – but also stolen, I called my leasing office. No, no one there had signed for it. I then called Fedex and spoke with Pat Long. When I explained the situation and gave her the tracking number Jennifer had provided me, she explained that this number was not for an item sent from AppleCare to me, but for the initial box I sent from my apartment to Apple. This made significantly more sense, given the dates. J Cornell, she explained, was an employee in the distribution department at the AppleCare facility in Elk Grove, California. She was even able to give me the specific drop-off point, 3011 Laguna St., Building A.

So AppleCare had mixed up the tracking numbers in their system, switching the incoming number for the outgoing number. That meant the iPod, if it had ever even been sent out, could still be anywhere. That same day I called AppleCare for a third time and spoke to Bill, a supervisor, the first such employee who was able to give me accurate information – at least, accurate to the best of his knowledge. After poking through the system, Bill was able to figure out that my old iPod had indeed been sent back to me via Fedex. Fedex had then made three attempts to deliver it to my apartment, one on 9/10, another on 9/11, and then again on 9/13. After three unsuccessful attempts they brought the device back to AppleCare.

Here is where yet another layer of unbelievably poor customer service enters the equation. Fedex, whom AppleCare chooses to rely on for their deliveries, left no notice on any of those three days that they had attempted to deliver a package. To make matters worse, I was home on all three of those days. No one rang the bell for my apartment, or left a slip, or even attempted to leave a package with the leasing office, which was open and visible from the front door. In short, no attempt whatsoever was made to “deliver” the iPod. I expressed my disbelief to Bill, who sighed and simply said, “It happens all the time. Fedex did it to me last week.”

While we were speaking, without me knowing it, Bill put a code into the system so that the distribution department would send the iPod back to me overnight (still leaving me with the problem of what to do when Fedex never bothered to deliver it). This caused a problem once we started talking about the issue I’d had with the device in the first place, those black lines. I explained to Bill that I was concerned that the product wasn’t being repaired, since Dorian had assured me it would be, and since no “accidental damage” had occurred. Bill looked again into the system. It had been sent back to me, he said, because the technicians had found that the moisture indicator, which lets them know if something has been spilled on the device, was fully red.

Except that nothing had spilled on it. Could moisture in the air set it off, I asked, exasperated? “No,” Bill laughed, “in that case mine would have gone off long ago.” Baffling. Then we hit another problem: Bill said that the technicians who assess such cases always take photos of the devices and put them into the computer system to document the decision. He could find no such photos of my iPod, i.e. no proof that it was actually my device that had been assessed or that the moisture indicator had actually been set off. With this in mind, and given the absurd process I had already gone through just to figure out where my broken iPod was, Bill said he would make sure it did indeed get replaced.

The next problem: he had already put in the code to have it overnighted to me. He said it couldn’t be called back once the order was in place. I’d just have to wait until it arrived – if it arrived – then get a new Fedex box, send it back to Apple, and start the entire process over again. Having already lost three weeks and countless hours to this absurdity, that was more than I could bear. Resigned to lose the sentimental engraving on the back of the iPod, I said instead that, once it was back in my hands, I would take it to the San Francisco Apple store. Bill said he was putting a code into the system that would override the initial decision not to replace it, which would let the Genius Bar technicians know no assessment was necessary. All they had to do was take my old iPod and hand me a new one.

Needless to say the original iPod did not arrive from Fedex as promised. The next morning, 9/23, I skipped class (I’m a graduate student at UC Berkeley as well as a technology journalist) to wait for the package, which never arrived. At Bill’s suggestion, I tracked down the number of my local Fedex facility and called to check on the status of the item, which had not yet reached their office despite being “overnighted,” but which, if they received it the next day, they said they would deliver before 2:00. The next day, Thursday, 9/24, I had many important things to do outside of the apartment, but literally could not leave in case I missed the package. I called Fedex again first thing in the morning to see when the delivery truck might come. They said they didn’t know but I should stay by the phone and they would call the driver who would call me back shortly with an estimate. No return call. I called again at noon and was told the same thing. Again, no return phone call. Finally, at 1:45, the doorbell rang.

24 days after calling with a simple hardware problem, numerous phone calls and moments of unnecessary stress later, I had my old iPod in-hand, exactly how I had sent it off, not repaired, not replaced. This had been literally a waste of hours and hours of life.

That Saturday, 9/26, I took it to the Apple store. At the Genius Bar I was seen by PJ, and given the reference number R26219782. I explained to PJ my long saga. Friendly and helpful, if baffled by the frantic state the entire process had worked me into, PJ told me that he could find no sign of the replacement code Bill had supposedly put into the system. What’s more, he had never heard or such a code before. At my wit’s end, I explained to him the initial problem, the black lines, the supposedly red moisture indicator. He said that the story I was told by AppleCare didn’t make sense, that iPods are hard to open up and technicians rarely if ever do so to take photos to put into the system. The moisture indicator, however, could be seen without opening the iPod case. PJ peered inside the jack.

The moisture indicator, which the technicians at AppleCare had marked in the system as being completely red, which had caused the iPod to be sent back to me in the first place, starting this entire saga – that moisture indicator, PJ said, had not been set off in the slightest. It was all a mistake. Perhaps they had been looking at the wrong iPod, he suggested.

Seeing my exasperated state and the myriad of notes in my file – made by one person after another with wrong information, a stunningly disheartening testament to the confusion and incompetence of AppleCare’s customer service representatives – PJ agreed to replace my iPod. He made notes in the system, gave me a printout confirmation, and told me to expect a phone call over the next few days letting me know the new device was available for pickup.

On Thursday, 10/1, a full month after beginning this process, I handed over my old iPod at the Genius Bar and received my new one – not engraved, certainly not easy to obtain, but working at least. When clearing my case through the system, the Genius Bar rep who made this last transaction spent a long time squinting at the screen, calling over supervisors, and trying to sort out whether or not to let me walk out of the store. When I’d finally been given the good-to-go nod I said, “This process has been endless and horrible. It’s not you guys here at the Geniur Bar, it’s AppleCare. I’d like to file an official complaint. How can I do that?”

The Genius Bar rep furrowed his brow, looked at my skeptically, and said “Um…” Then he tapped the rep to his right on the shoulder. “This woman would like to file an official complaint with AppleCare,” he said. Together they looked at me like I was annoying and crazy. The second rep laughed, then the first, a laugh that said, “It doesn’t work like that. They don’t care.” And that was all the info they would give me.

Needless to say, this drawn-out, hellish process has seriously tainted my view of AppleCare, if not Apple products. As someone working in the tech industry and a contributor to publications like Macworld, I’ve long had high esteem for Apple and the items they sell. At the height of this ordeal, I posted on Twitter the follow warning, which went out to hundreds of followers: “NEVER send your iPod to AppleCare for repair. It will disappear for three weeks, appear stolen, and reappear un-repaired.” How can I recommend an iPod or any other device to a friend or a reader when there’s even a chance that their customer service experience could mirror mine?