"the hard drive's headin south"

my poor little ipod whom i've had for over 3 years and 3 months is starting to send signals saying he's too tired, too old, and too overworked to go on much longer. low (no) battery life, randomly skipping songs, freezing mid-album....

Last night, i decided to 'doctor' it up a bit by restoring its factory settings. Right, got it, no problem. I've had to do this before and it worked great. All was going fine last night until halfway through re-installing my music library. It completely freaked out. I mean....completely. it got to a song called 'the wall' and it pretty much hit a wall. it couldn't continue. It didn't exactly freeze but it definitely stopped responding. I couldn't eject it from itunes or make it stop thinking it was still updating the library or even make it respond when i 'illegally' unplugged it from the computer. nothing! but what it WAS doing was getting super, super hot. i could hear the gears grinding and when they didn't stop, i started to panic. I tried prying the case open to unplug the battery, but that idea was a complete bust. so i sat there, not knowing what to do, all the while it's getting hotter and hotter to the point where i thought if i didn't do something to fix this thing or kill it completely it was going to start on fire and burn my apartment down! (i NEVER overreact). So i did what any sane human would do and threw it in the freezer (literally threw it, hoping the slam against the back of the freezer would break it or at least cause it to snap out of it's comatose state. it did neither one). to keep you from thinking that i'm totally nuts, not only did i think the freezer would keep my ipod from burning my apartment down, I'd also heard that freezing a damaged hard drive could prevent the loss of any additional data (which is true), but in my case didn't really matter. but hey, worth a shot.

5 minutes later, i pulled it out of the freezer and it was back to normal...for the most part. however, only 2 (definitely non-favorite) songs had been successfully re-installed even though my computer said over 1,600 had been. ok....well, at least it's back to operating fuctionality again....and since i'm a genius, i decided to plug it back into my computer and force it to try to finish the job it has so unsuccessfully started in the first place. bad idea. same problem. back to the freezer. still...not....working.

the professionals at the apple store were able to temporarily shock the life back into him, but i know it's only temporary. like putting a bandaid on a broken leg. 3 years and 3 months. that was the basic life span of my particular ipod. a 3rd generation ipod. an ipod before the click wheel, before the color screen, before photo or video capabilities. an ipod who so faithfully served me on my daily commute to and from work, allowing me to blissfully distract myself from yet another homeless person begging for money, the paris hilton wannabe participating in an invigorating game of 'yell-ular' with her bff who, "omg, like, totally bought that louis vuitton handbag i was oggling", the mother completely ignoring the cries of her extreemly vocal 4 year old, and the old man with no teeth hitting on me from across the isle. i felt like i was betraying an old friend tonight as i browsed the shiny new ipod models at the apple store, looking at the fancy iphones, the mega-storage ipod classics, the ipod touches, and the ipod video nanos. so many beautiful options, but SO not the same as my old faithful.

I walked out empty handed, with my old ipod in my pocket, thinking (mostly hoping) that maybe the crazy people on the bus won't be so bad.....