Assault of the Batteries

This week, my parents came to visit for a few days. Since Tim's birthday was yesterday, and my mom's is the second week in December, it was the perfect time to go shopping.

First up, my mom. Her old ipod's battery (first generation) recently died, so we went to the Apple store to upgrade her to something a little more current: the itouch, which is kind of like going from the Model T to a spaceship.

After the sales staff finished laughing themselves silly at her old ipod, and it was packed off to the Smithsonian to sit next to the T-rex, we took her new one home to charge it before I downloaded her music onto it.

Less then two hours later, it was fully charged according to the giant picture of the battery on the screen, but it wouldn't work. At all. It just kept taunting us with the full battery symbol.

I pushed every button (actually, there are only two, but I pushed them many, many, many times in every possible combination.) Nothing. Then my father tried every possible combination. Still nothing. (I grabbed it before my mother could go through the same useless ritual, since I was already on my last nerve and my Valium supply was low.) I even hooked it up to my computer and tried to sync it, hoping I could fool it into actually working. Once again, nothing.

I got on the Apple website and found the same picture listed there (Yeah. That was a huge help. It told me that it was fully charged and to sync it with my computer. Well, duh!), but no explanation of what to do to move on. In other words...nothing.

I tried calling the Applecare helpline, but my cordless phone battery died before I got to speak to a live person. (Great. One device fully charged, one that can't hold a charge, and they are teamed up against me. I soooo love modern technology.)

Long story short (not really, since I am already planning another blog with the whole agonizing ipod story), I ended up going back to the store.

Meanwhile, back at the mall, I had bought Tim a digital camera for his birthday, along with two rechargeable batteries and a charger which we had also plugged in to charge (the kitchen counter was beginning to look like a Radio Shack display case at this point). Excitedly, we watched the charger light up, indicating higher and higher percents of the full charge (we obviously don't get out much if we considered this our evening's entertainment. For New Year's Eve, we might go really crazy and plug in a couple of cell phones to see which one has more bars after an hour:) ).

Anyway, we did manage to tear ourselves away from this fascinating and mysterious display long enough to go have dinner (and a trip to the Apple store), and when we returned...magic! The solid light on the charger indicated a full battery. Popping it into the camera, we turned the camera on and...nothing! We were now two for two. We popped it back into the charger, just to check and see if we had misread the symbol. Nope. Full battery.

Since we didn't know at this point whether it was the battery or the charger at fault (it couldn't possibly be us), we opened the second battery and began to (hopefully) charge it. Two hours, and much cursing later, we had another fully charged battery (maybe). With bated breath, we popped it into the camera and...success at last! Well, one out of three wasn't so bad.

Feeling much abused by all the new battery operated devices from Hell, I finally tumbled into bed somewhere near midnight. Tiredly, I reached for my alarm clock to turn it on. But wait. Something was wrong. It was not 3:30 in the morning, and the year was definitely not 1999. Picking up the clock, I discovered, upon further inspection that it hadn't been Tim trying to mess with me that had screwed up my alarm clock (so I put down the pillow I was planning on beating him with). It was just that the clock had...you guessed it...a low battery! (I swear you can't make this stuff up!)

Needless to say, next year, I am giving them both something that does not require batteries. I can't think of what that might be, but I have a whole year to figure it out.