Say Anything Blog

OK this isn’t any big deal but it’s just so frustrating.

For Christmas I got my wife an Ipod.  She was hinting that she’d like one.  You know kinda like they sweetly say “I’d like an Ipod.”  Usually I’m pretty dense but in this case I got the message.  Besides I was buying the family another computer for Christmas (you can never have too many) and needed to divert her attention so she didn’t notice.

Sometime ago she signed herself up to ITunes in order to buy “music”.  Well I figured, what’s the harm?  As long as she uses the ear buds it won’t bother me.  I don’t get this new country music, but then my tastes have frozen since 1987.

For the last month or so she’s been fighting with ITunes to let her download her purchased songs onto the IPod.  Finally tonight she asked me to look into it.  Now I don’t have a lot of patience for tech problems but any patience leaves me when it’s someone else’s problem that I have to deal with.  (SEP’s don’t bother me normally of course)

The problem was that 22 of the 35 songs that she had purchased wouldn’t come down.  The explanation was extremely poor.  One of the things that irritate me is when you can’t copy the error message to the clipboard?  I mean why is that?  It’s like the nerds working in the software labs want to frustrate us users as much as possible.

My question would be why is it that some of the songs come down and not others?  I mean if something’s wrong then nothing should work, right?

So I Googled the error message and came to an help page on Apple.  I followed the instructions not thinking that they’d work.  One of the first steps is to deauthorize and reauthorize the computer.  To be honest that didn’t sound like it’d work but I didn’t know anything better to do.  It said to deauthorize the computer in the menu bar and reauthorize it by playing a song.

So I had to track her down where she was fixing the lawn mower or something and ask her for her password.  The next step was to deauthorize the computer and click on a song to play it.  Um, the password didn’t work to reauthorize the computer.  I tried a dozen times and finally had to have ITunes email me to reset the password.  OK that worked after I tracked her down to find her where she was chopping firewood and get her password for her email account. 

So I clicked on a song again, it asked for the password, I put in the new password and the song played.  At this point it was time to sync the IPod.  What came back was a message that not 22 but 9 songs wouldn’t download, maybe because the computer wasn’t authorized?  What the….?

I mean why would 13 of them work and the other nine didn’t.

Well I decided to deauthorize the computer again, so back to the top bar.  The new password wouldn’t work. 

After several tries I put in the OLD password, that worked.  With the computer deauthorized I decided I’d authorize the computer on the top bar.  The OLD Password worked again, even to connect to the Apple store.

At this point I synced the IPod and voila no error message.

I realize that this is no big deal, but it’s just perplexing that I’d have to go through so many steps to get this simple thing done.  And the new/old password thing just doesn’t make sense at all. 

(My wife wasn’t really fixing on the lawnmower or chopping wood.)