An Open Letter to Apple, Inc.

I have a piece of white tape on my sleek six-month-old MacBook Pro. On it is the toll free number for Apple Care. I'm on a first-name basis with lots of technicians there: Magic Mike, Tiffani, and most recently Bobby from Tennessee. His soft southern accent sets me at ease. They're all great. No complaints. Apple Care isn't cheap, but it's truly fabulous. You get real people, real quick, and you're  probably calling Tennessee, not Bangladesh. Wait times are short; you get a choice of pop, jazz or classical music to listen to; and these people can really solve your problems, and they'll hang with you until they do.

Libby the mourning dove loved to sit on the screen top while I wrote about her. Note large external hard drive in the background. This is an example of foreshadowing. 

And I love the machines, and can't imagine life without them. So if you're hoping to see me send Apple through the cider press, bashing their products to juice, that's not going to happen. As always, I am trying to help here.

However. I  have an observation on Macintosh corporate culture that I was moved to air in a lousy sort of prose poem, composed in the wee hours after spending six months grappling with a problem that never should have happened to me. I believe it's due to a very simple, fixable oversight on Mac's part, and an assumption they're making about their customers that ain't necessarily so. Here we go:

The Cloud! How aptly named!
Solid construct, or phantasm?
I can tell you this.
When you go buy a new computer, and the Genius in attendance
Is 1/3 your age, and has never lived in back of beyond
Stop there! and look around
for an eminence grise
Who remembers what it was to dance without a Net.
Do not buy your goods from the young Genius!

With me watching, and not understanding what that meant,
The Genius clicked a box under Settings/Storage.
It said, "Optimize Storage." Sounded good to me!
I'm all for optimization!
Box clicked, I forgot about it, but it would bedevil me
and occasionally stop me cold
From July until January.

When hard drive space gets small
As it often does for someone who takes photos
Of every little thing I love or wonder about
This little checkbox does a thing.
It sends all my files up to the Cloud.
Which is fine in theory, for those with unlimited bandwidth
In Tokyo, Toronto, Columbus or New York.
It is Hell in practice, for those of us who live among the trees
And to use the Net, must catch and buy a satellite's beam.

Up and away went my photos, the Keynote slideshows I spent months on
Leaving nothing in their place.
Up and away went my bandwidth, too.
Click on a photo, just try it! Open a file if you can!
Not so fast, loser!
It must be downloaded from the Cloud before you can view it
Or attach it
Or put it in a slideshow.
Or do anything at all.
The spinning beachball of death appears on your screen.
You sit in despair. Nothing that was yours is yours any more.
The next morning, there might appear on your desktop
The photo you needed, last night at 7. Look! It opened! Hooray!
And it only took all night. Isn't that neat?

Show up to give your lecture. Try to open your Keynote presentation.
You built it lovingly, four months in the making. You built it on your laptop.
It's right here, in Keynote.  Click, and click again.
Nothing happens. But don't panic! Don't worry! Your program is saved, up there on The Cloud!
Shall we all grow wings and fly up to watch it there? Without fast WiFi, you can't get it back.
I live and work in lots of places without WiFi.
Sometimes I give talks in tents, with haybales for seating.
Imagine, if you can, young Genius, not having WiFi wherever you go.
I'm telling you, it happens. Maybe not in your world, but in mine.

I stare at the dialog box. You do not have permission to complete this operation.
Wait! Who took it from me? Help me understand, O Genius,
Why I'd want to save my work
To a place where I can never get it back?
With 200 people murmuring in an auditorium
Wondering what's going on with this evening's speaker.

Six months of hell and bewilderment, and now I must re-set, reclaim, and download
All that once was mine. All my files, snatched away
When Genius clicked a checkmark
In a little box that read, "Documents and Desktop"
to be saved to The Cloud. Let's Optimize Storage for you, too. Click!
I had no clue what that meant. Now I know.
That was July. This is January.

Train your Geniuses, for I have suffered. Tell them this simple thing:
Not everyone who buys a Mac lives in Tokyo or Toronto,
Columbus or New York.
Some of us eke out a living
On a rugged frontier
Where bandwidth is metered out by the meanest of Scrooges.
A hundred bucks gets you 15 gigs, and it has to last you all month.

Imagine! Or at least try! I know it's hard...
You could use that in a day bingeing Breaking Bad
And never stop to think what it means, or what it costs
To Optimize Storage way out here in the boondocks.
Or how it feels to have your work disappear
Locked in a misty cloud somewhere high above.
I'm not playing games on this laptop.
 This is my living you've messed with.

Hear this! The Cloud is not my friend. It is a cruel overlord
Who takes my work and won't give it back.
Give me hard drives by the armful! I shall label them with tape
Tiny writing telling all that's inside.
When I need to, I will plug them in
And my work will open before me.
I'll take my chances and back them up twice.
They're here with me, and real.

This is my only option, living where I do
With Hughes Net the only provider
Charging a king's ransom
For almost nothing.
We don't stream; we don't listen to podcasts
We have no favorite Internet shows
Netflix is unknown to us. Imagine!
We could be Amish!

I won't forget the young man in his black tee who,
with a cruel glint in his eye
Stood in Columbus' clean white Apple store
Watching me deliberate over which hard drive to buy.
"In four years, there won't be any such thing as an external hard drive.
It'll all be backed up on The Cloud."
He smirked at me, enjoying the look of panic and dismay on my face
Knowing not what he was saying
Or caring, to whom.

That was eight years ago, and I eschew his store
To buy my hard drives online. They're half the price now,
 with five times the storage
And, last I checked, they still exist.
The Genius was wrong, but worse, he was mean.

Know this: Those of us who live with bad Internet
Might not be backward or dumb.
We have chosen trees over people for neighbors.
They are never annoying
Until they fall on your roof.
You suck down bandwidth like a supersized latte.
Out here in the middle, we have a demitasse cup
And a tiny coffee stirrer through which we slowly sip
What little Net we get. We make do.
We like our external hard drives,
and yes, they still exist.
The Cloud is another matter.

Here's my message to Apple:
Before you set us up, I pray, please ask us:
Where we live, what we pay, and what we get for that.
15 gigs per month? 24 kilobytes per second?
Stop, Genius!!  Don't check that little box
That backs it all up to a Cloud
That won't give it back.

It's simple enough.
Come, Genius.
Let me explain this to you.
I have suffered for your ignorance.

Oh Justin? Where are You?

Well. I'm choosing to look at this period as an intensive course in Computer Self-Sufficiency. In Keeping a Level Head when the Worst Happens. In The Value of External Hard Drives.

I've decided, as of tonight, that I need to view my laptop not as the sole repository for the entire contents of my life and work, but merely as a convenience by which I may be allowed to view and work with said contents. It's nice to carry my life and work around with me, but I have learned that, through a mysterious incompatability with an aged email program, the whim of a computer repair technician, a hard drive crash, or a spilled glass of Shiraz (never done that, but I expect to one day), or any number of other slight mishaps, it all can be taken away. "Wiped," in computer parlance. Thus my newfound and fervent faith in external hard drives.

As I write, my faithful Phantom hard drive is grinding away, feeding little spoonfuls of saved photos to the newly re-installed iPhoto '08 program on my laptop. You couldn't have gotten me to delete 18,000 photos off my laptop if you'd held an AK-47 to my head. I needed to, mind you, but you couldn't have made me do it. It was just too wonderful to have them all there, my babies all gathered around me, to be summoned up whenever I wanted to see them. Apple did it for me when they erased my hard drive. Oh, gee, thanks, I guess. Thank you for cleaning my closet, and my clock.

Now I'm importing just the photos I've taken since January 1, 2009, a mere 7,500 of them. They'll finish loading around 2 AM. And when I get up in the morning I'll delete about half of 'em, because HEY they're still on the external hard drive and I've already done showed 'em to you, haven't I? I don't really need to carry them around with me. And now, finally and forever, I realize that it's the external hard drive that matters, not that sleek, fancy little titanium-clad laptop that I love so much. MacBookPro is my mercurial fair-weather lover; the external hard drive is my dependable husband.

I am a hard-headed woman and it took a little computer catastrophe to force me to see how I should be managing and conserving my data. I've really lost nothing but time and several billion brain cells, the ones that spontaneously exploded in frustration as I, reluctant computer jock, tried to understand how to work my way out of this mess, how to rebuild from scratch what I had taken for granted. Thanks to Bill, my unemotional, analytical rock, for his patience. Mad cows are hard to reason with, but he hung in there. At one point, when I had the feeling he thought I was overreacting to it all, I asked him what he'd do if Apple erased his hard drive while fixing his computer. "I'd tell them they needed to send me a new laptop to make it good." Oh. Maybe I wasn't overreacting.

I didn't ask for anything. I choked back tears, thanked them for their help, and accepted their offer of a new Leopard operating system as consolation for having lost three weeks of sanity and work time. I'm still waiting for the disc to arrive, still convinced that, upon installation, it will probably erase my hard drive. Call me leery. I've come by leery honestly.

I did cut and paste my last blog post into the Apple Customer Satisfaction Survey comments section, barely making it under the 2,000 character limit for their comments box. Just to let them know that they erased the Wrong Hard Drive. Just to let them know they messed with the Wrong Blogger. I am sure the corporate HQ is already all abuzz about it. Uh-oh. We messed with Julie Zickefoose's data, man. Heads will surely roll.

What would really help, if anyone at Apple is out there reading, would be for Justin Long to show up at my door, having used The Googles to find me at Indigo Hill. He'd have a brown box under his skinny little arm. He'd be wearing a black hoodie and pencil-thin jeans, and he'd say, "You look like you've had a rough day. I mean, you still look terrific--beautiful, in fact-- but a little tired. Here. Let me put down your new MacBook Pro so I can rub your shoulders. Do you have any sweet almond oil?"


Now THAT would help.