[Personal] Yoko Ono killed my PMC...

Last May, I won a Creative Zen Personal Media Center from Microsoft Webcasts. Great little device, I loved it to death.

I had copied all of my music and ripped several of my music video DVD's down so that I could either watch my tunes or listen to my tunes, depending on my mood and how many vehicles the train had hit on the way home.

Anyway, I was walking to the train station back in December from the office, and the video for "Let It Be" started playing on the PMC. Great song, one of McCartney's best, yada yada yada.

I don't know how many of you know the video that was filmed for it of the band supposedly recording the song, but about two-thirds of the way through it, you see Yoko Ono fawning all over John Lennon like he's hung like a stallion and she wants to ride the wild horse right then...well, either that or she looked stoned, but with her, who can tell?

Anyway, that scene always disturbed me for some reason. That part of the video just felt...wrong. Evidently, my Portable Media Center agreed, because the moment that frame of the video played, I heard a click and then nothing. I stepped to the side of the sidewalk, opened my padded hip pack, opened the protective shell covering the screen, and saw a large yellow triangle with the number 5 in the middle, and an airline-style drawing showing me putting the PMC in a box and sending it to the middle of nowhere.

I got home, pulled up the documentation online, and it said to E-mail the customer service department. Now, I have to say this...Creative's products may rock my socks off, but I have never had a good experience with their customer service department. As someone who has owned almost every Creative soundcard since the original SoundBlaster!, and as someone who has had regular contact with Creative's customer service department, that's saying something. The quality of their products has generally been high enough for me to put less weight on the inevitable crap service when it comes to my purchasing decisions...

So anyway, I E-mail their customer service department, and for nearly three weeks, we bounce back and forth a series of rather discouraging E-mails. We finally determine that I need to fill out a form with all the information that I had to enter in order to even initiate the conversation in order to get my RMA, and at that point, I put them on the back shelf for about six weeks. I just kept thinking...if I had to give you all this information to even contact you, why do I need to fill out a form with the same information in order to get the thing fixed?

Anyway, I had some time and emotional energy back in February to fill out the form and get my RMA. I sent my PMC off to the deepest depths of Oklaholma, where it arrived after two weeks. (Evidently, mail goes slow there.)

Creative has had my PMC since the 6th, but according to the status page for my PMC, they haven't even tested it yet.



(Evidently, the techs are running on mail time. However, the guys who cash the checks you send in so that they'll look at your devices? They're running at light speed, because the check shows as being deposited on the same day they received it.)

So while I wait impatiently for my PMC to get tested so they can fix it, I've got plenty of time to get upset about other things, like the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and Windows Media 9 not being supported on Pocket PC 2002 but both being supported on Windows 98, or Robert Scoble waffling about the role he created for himself (hint: When you stop doing your most popular feature [link blog] but still do mostly links in your primary blog, guess what? Your primary blog is now your link blog. Suck it up and accept your unwittingly chosen path or blog some completely original content, bitch.), or that rather than deal with the United States rapidly approaching our $8.4 trillion debt cap, our senators are choosing to speak to state assemblymen about unconstitutional laws.

Stress...fun.