Embracing Chaos

Yesterday morning I woke up feeling like a zombie and was happy to figure out that with the end of daylight savings time, I had an extra hour to do homework.  I started turning the clocks in my house back.  They were all pretty easy except one.

My inappropriately named "smart phone" just needed to reboot (not at all uncommon) to get its clock reset.  But before too long I realized that not only was my smart phone was smart enough to move back its own clock, but that it also moved back every appointment in my calendar by an hour.  For many months I’ve been using this application as my primary scheduling calendar outside of work, so it’s full of stuff for months into the future.  I really didn’t want to update hundreds of calendar entries by hand (I’m a busy guy) so I broke down and called support.

First tier of VZW support says "that’s a feature of the phone." I called his bluff and he connected me to technical data support.  After hearing the issue, Tim from tech support laughed and apologizesdnicely for it.  After a bit of digging we found a knowledge base article describing this exact problem and the workaround steps.  Like Tim had suggested, plugging it into Outlook will fix all the calendar entries that were originally created in Outlook.  But ever since the Outlook sync application broke for the 17th time I’ve stopped trying to synchronize my calendars between my PC and my phone and have just been using the one that I always have with me.  So essentially all my calendar entries are phone-enterred, which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Reading the KB article carefully it says in a roundabout way that for appointments enterred in the phone you have two choices: erase them and recreate them, or adjust them by hand.  I had to point this out to Tim whose casual reading of the KB article had convinced him that all our problems were solved.  When I said this was unacceptable, we finally got a hold of Carlos at Palm technical support, although it was amazingly difficult even with Tim driving.

Carlos had the creative suggestion of telling my phone it was in Mountain Time instead of Pacific.  Smart move for a smart phone because now all my calendar appointments actually had the correct time again!  Carlos was hoping this would satisfy me and I’d go away, but I realized that with the phone’s clock set ahead an hour I would still get all my reminders an hour ahead of when they should be.  After a bit more monkeying around like this he admited that my only option was to update them all by hand.  I thanked Carlos for being utterly unhelpful despite doing his best and drove off to school planning my revenge.

I don’t think I’ve yet warned both of you my dear readers, but if either of you are considering buying a high-end phone, stay as far away from the Treo 700w as possible.  Its problems are too numerous to list in this blog post, but I’ll write the first few that come to mind.  Like the CDMA stack crashing periodically so it stops receiving phone calls or text messages with no visual indication that anything is wrong.  Or the fact that the POP3 e-mail plugin is only about 10% reliable.  Or the moronic UI that happens if you accidentally hit the prominent side-of-phone volume buttons while pulling the phone out of your pocket to answer it, producing a dialog which covers up the name of the caller, and because the touch-screen is disabled in call-mode you can’t dismiss the dialog.  Or the fact that the camera can only take about 1 picture every 15 seconds because you almost always need to reboot the camera app between shots.  I could go on for pages.  It really is the worst phone I have ever heard of.  At least it’s bulky and expensive.  I periodically hear rumors about a class-action suit against Palm because of it.

All of this infuriates me with a rage I rarely feel in my oh-so-mature late-early-thirties.  I’m often tempted to smash the thing into the sidewalk but I know my insurance plan would just get me a brand-new but just-as-shitty replacement.  Why am I so upset?  Because I hate Steve and Bill?  I don’t think so — I know myself well enough to realize that I don’t get this way unless I’m hiding from something.  I think the true answer might lie in the fact that I was stupid enough to think buying this phone was a good idea.  I wanted to be cool and on the cutting edge and definitely should have known better than to trust an important part of my personal infrastructure to a v1.0 product. 

It’s tempting to spend a lot of energy bitching at VZW or Palm and try to get them to replace my phone with a 700p.  Or to spend a weekend with Ruby on Rails and build a "everything I hate about my Treo" support site.  Or maybe to organize that class action suit.  But few of these things actually add value to the world. What I’d really like is for Palm or MSFT to write a little application that fixes this problem for me.  Instead, I’ll probably spend a few humble hours this week while on the plane to China setting back every entry in my calendar.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 9:45 AM and is filed under Ego, Gadgets, Personal Growth, Technology, User Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.