Nothing makes me feel more anxious and helpless these days than having a tech crisis. When one of my Apple devices stops functioning, I can feel the adrenaline, the panic rising in my chest. I was calmer when a doctor told me he saw a tumor that could be “a problem” in a scan of my brain. It proved to be benign, but I was calmer then, more accepting, than I was when my iPhone stopped working in Kansas City.

I was visiting my daughter, the night before flying home, when I plugged the charging cord into my iPhone but did not hear a ping or see a lightning bolt over the battery icon. I unplugged it and plugged it back, many times—no ping. It was 28% charged.

Everyone else in the house was sleeping, so I called Apple support. The lady I spoke with asked me to hold while she looked something up. But the battery was running down! I asked for a supervisor who might be more familiar with the problem. He was not. He said the battery had probably gone bad and I would need to replace the phone.

The phone was just over a year old, out of warranty. It had no trade-in value if it wasn’t working. And how would I get home? I needed to call an Uber to get to the airport in Kansas City, I’d have to stand in line for a paper boarding pass, and when I arrived in Denver, I’d have to call an uber to get home. I turned the phone off and slept badly.

I almost missed the flight, because there was such a long line to see a human at the airport, and when I was settled on the plane, I realized: I have nothing to do. All the other folks are watching their screens. I’d downloaded a book and a movie to watch on the iPhone but my battery is at 12%.

I’m thrumming with anxiety. My daughter told me if her phone breaks, she goes right to the store and buys a new one. “I can’t function without it. I have two young sons, a job, and I’m coordinating and texting all day.”

Landing in Denver, there’s just enough battery to order an uber to drive me home. The next day, I’m at the Apple store when the doors open. I take a seat, praying for a truly smart “genius,” when a heavyset young man named Dan says, “How can I help you?”

He shows me that my charging cord isn’t going all the way into the charging port. He puts the phone on a wireless charger and it starts charging! Why didn’t the Apple supervisor tell me to try a wireless charger? I hadn’t known that such a thing existed, but he’s an Apple supervisor.

Dan takes the phone back through the door where the geniuses come and go. I think of it as the “green door.” (Remember the song?) He returns, saying there was a speck of rice or dirt stuck in the charging port, he dug it out, and now it’s fine. I want to drop to my knees. Kiss his ring.

And I can’t help pondering: why has it come to pass that we’re utterly dependent on our devices? Decades ago, I switched from a Windows machine to a Mac primarily because Apple had phone support, which Microsoft did not. But Apple’s phone support has degraded. It’s rare now that you get someone who knows anything about your issue, and the average time I spend on the phone with them is an hour. Even worse, the Apple stores no longer offer help with anything but hardware issues. That used to be my fall-back: go to the store. But now, for software problems, they tell you to “call the phone team.”

WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG FOR AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE—

As I was preparing to post this blog, my new $2700 Macbook Pro stopped working. It won’t boot and won’t shut down. The screen alternates between a flashing white apple icon and and a faint message in tiny print: “Continue loading for startup options.” Back and forth, that’s all it does. I go to the Apple store in Honolulu, where I’m living until April, and they tell me it’s a hardware problem, they’ll have to “ship it to the mainland to be fixed,” and it will take about 10 days. They won’t just give me a new one? It’s only 2 months old. Clearly a lemon. But of course they refuse. Because they can.

But back to my original blog.

A Visit to Hell

I never wanted an Apple watch. I didn’t want a device strapped on my arm, getting and sending signals 24/7. But then my friend, Joan Borysenko, said she’d ordered one because of the “find my phone” feature.

Aha. At least five times a day, I’ve had to search my home for the phone because it wasn’t in my hand or the place I thought I’d left it. I keep a land line for the sole purpose of calling the phone to find it.

I ordered one on Black Friday, last November, because it was $50 off. When it arrived, weeks later, it came with a USB-C charging cable. I took apart the package looking for an adapter so I could plug it into the wall. But there was none.

Down I went to the Apple store, irritated that they hadn’t informed me I’d need to buy an adapter. An Apple guy, Dave, sold me one for $25 (it was cheaper online but I needed it now), then took me to the set-up table. But he couldn’t set up the watch. He needed to use my iPhone for that, and the phone hadn’t been updated to the latest software. Dan said the update had just come out the day before, but Apple hadn’t yet notified customers. So I had to sit in the crowded store for 30 minutes while the phone updated.

Then Dave walked me through setting up the watch, and I took notes because I wouldn’t remember everything. I chose the face, the color, the style, what apps to put in the four corners of the watch, and what “complications” I wanted. Generally I don’t want “complications,” but Dave said they were services, not problems.

When I thought I’d absorbed all I could, I noticed a small scratch in the watch face. And I hadn’t even worn it yet.

Dave took the watch behind the green door. Twenty minutes later, he returned, trailing after a female manager who had a long, horsey face and was not smiling. She said I paid $250 for the watch but I’d have to pay $50 more now because I bought it with a gift card on Black Friday.

So? Apply the gift card to the replacement, I said.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “The price today is $300. If I gave you $50 off, I’d be giving you $100 because you already got $50 off.”

What kind of double speak was this? The item was damaged, Apple’s fault, it should be replaced at no extra cost. But she was emphatic, repeating that I had to pay an extra $50. I’d been anxious before but now I was incensed. One of the richest companies in the world was holding me hostage for $50? Adrenaline was surging. (Remember how this started? Adrenaline. Not good.)

Okay, I said, take the gift card back and apply it to this watch.

“You’ll have to show me the email sent from Apple with the gift card,” she said. “We don’t have any record of it.”

I started searching my email, when was Black Friday? I scrolled to that day. Nothing. They’re watching me with stern faces. Then I find it. I show her the email with the gift card. She jots some notes, then goes back behind the green door.

At this point, I’m thinking, if they still resist, I’ll just take the damaged watch. The hell with them.

Another 15 minutes go by. She comes out with a new watch and says, “OK, we can exchange it.” But she’s not smiling.

Dave and I start over, setting up the new watch. It’s 7:30 p.m. when I leave—three and a half hours lost at Apple. I ask Dave, why didn’t she start out by telling me she needed the email?

He looks glum. “I’ve worked here 12 years and every year after Black Friday, this happens.” Every year, Dave says, he asks the managers above him in the Apple chain to fix the problem. “In every other store—Best Buy, Target, Walmart—if you exchange something you bought with a discount, the discount carries over to the new item,” he says. “But Management never responds.”

I hate Apple now.

Losing A Friend

I love the Macbook Pro I bought in 2015. But during the past year, it’s been shutting down in the middle of work, turning off and on erratically. I was told the battery was “swollen,” and needed to be replaced. But Apple won’t work on a machine that’s more than five years old, and the independent mac repair shops in town have a two-week waiting period to get a new battery installed.

My life is on that computer. How could I survive two weeks without it? Could you?

So I bite the bullet and order the brand new MacBook Pro. The old one was a 32 bit machine, and the new one is a 64 bit. I can’t tell you what that means, except that the apps that worked on the 32 bit won’t work on the 64.

My friend, Caroline Hall, who also bought the new Mac, had warned me there was “a steep learning curve. I called Apple support 15, maybe 20 times, and each call was at least an hour,” she said

But what choice do I have? I’m adapting to the new Mac, but I don’t find one element—not one aspect of the new machine—that works better than the old Mac. Everything is harder and less intuitive. I can’t stand the the new email program. The old one seemed friendly; the new one seems cluttered, ugly, hard to navigate, and counter-intuitive.

What can we do? Apple is like the Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. We all know Apple needs to be reined in, broken up, as do Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. But that aint gonna happen any time soon, and tech keeps marching, marching on.

I need to concentrate on what I do have some control over —my anxiety. As with other deep-rooted tendencies, you can’t get rid of anxiety. You need to find a way to neutralize it, de-fang it. For me, the best technique, which I learned from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi,* who at 89 was a wiz at technology, is to accept that anxiety is part of your inner world. Then widen your focus, expand your sense of that inner world to include what you love and cherish: friends, grandkids, books, music, stories, the beauty of nature. It’s all there in that expanded space where anxiety resides.

I like to visualize the anxiety, see it as a little girl with hair that sticks straight up, who’s in my chest, screaming and punching her fists. I imagine putting my arms around that little girl, showering her with love, telling her I know she’s trying to protect me, she’s done a good job, and she can relax now.

Often, but not always, it works. The anxiety settles, and slowly fades.

I’m wondering what works for you? I’d love to hear. Please leave a comment.

AND, if you know anyone who has influence at Apple, please forward this blog to that person.

 

*Read about Reb Zalman in The December Project.