Jinx

Remember that time I stopped travelling and took a two and a half week break? Remember that time the day before I was heading back on the road and I told you not to worry and that I would have stories for you soon? Well, my friends, this would be what they refer to as jinxing yourself.

It wasn't four hours into my nine and a half hour drive from Minnetonka, MN to St Louis, MO that I picked up my phone from it's resting place under my stereo to check the time to see an error message reading, "Please visit apple.com to restore phone."

What the heck?

I pulled over into the next rest stop to further investigate. Thank you Iowa, by the way, for having free wifi at all your rest stops. It's rather convenient. I powered off my phone and when I tried to power back on, nothing. Obviously at this point I was in panic mode so I pulled my laptop out from it's hiding place behind the back seat, slid it out of it's pink protective case and was on apple.com/support faster than you could blink an eye. Trouble shoot, restore attempt, connect to iTunes - my apologies if this sounds like complete gibberish to you, that's not my intention. The main thing you need to take away from this little forty-five minute pit stop is that the phone was not coming back to me, no matter how hard I tried.

Get to St Louis. Get to St Louis and find an apple store. E-mail my couchsurfing host, Allie, and let her know what's going on and that I no longer have a phone she can reach me on. Drive, drive, drive.

Five and a half hours later, five and a half very long, boring, radio-filled hours later I was pulling up to the Galleria Mall in St Louis and virtually sprinting in to find the Apple store. To make a completely long, and enraging experience a short story, the "Geniuses" that I dealt with at this store were clearly 100% more concerned with getting off their shift and going home for the day than helping me solve my problem. They came to the conclusion that both my hardware (phone) and SIM card were damaged and could not be fixed. That's right folks, the two things that make my life line work had apparently both simultaneously self-destructed while sitting in my car, not in use. Makes perfect sense. My favourite part of the whole Apple transaction was that this moron Andy expected me to purchase a new replacement iPhone before leaving - even though having a "damaged SIM card" would make it virtually impossible for me to make this replacement phone work.

This is the part when I can feel you all rolling your eyes in disgust at how reliant my generation has become on technology and cell phones. Well, you'd be proud to know that I lasted a full thirty hours before I caved and went to AT&T and purchased a new pay as you go phone.... and then an iPod touch so that I could still use all the apple functionalities and apps without actually having my iPhone. You know what they say, though, you can't help who you love. And although I was beyond furious with Apple and their service, I still purchased a new Apple iPod - which WILL be for sale once I can make it back to Winnipeg to get my phone up and running (32GB, 5th Generation, Blue, iPod touch - with case, screen protector, charger, and 2 year applecare warranty - leave a comment if you're interested).

Anyways, as you can see, it has been an eventful couple days. Yet, aside from technology withdrawal, St Louis was absolutely incredible. I found a fabulous host in Allie which met me at her place with a glass of red wine upon my arrival after the Apple store ordeal. Needless to say we were instant best friends.

On that note, and that glass of wine, here's to the next destination - iPod, and new phone in hand.