While cleaning up old paperwork, I ran into a receipt from late 1999, for a WD 27.3 GB hard drive with an Ultra 66 Cable. The price for that thing was $275.94 with taxes. Nowadays, I can get a 2 TB hard drive (that’s 2,000 GB) for less than $150. How times have changed!
You can get buried in paperwork in this modern, electronic, paperless society of ours. Bank statements, tax records, property tax statements, mortgage statements, credit card statements, store receipts, business expenses, insurance records, car records, the receipt for last Tuesday’s gadget purchase that you have to keep for two years because you also got an extended care plan, the restaurant receipt from last August’s meal with a client that you have to keep for the IRS since you’re deducting it from your taxes, etc., ad nauseam.
Can’t we have it simpler? Can’t it all be truly electronic? Can’t everyone just send us email receipts and statements instead of giving us paper ones? I like the way the Apple store does it. You buy something, you have the option of getting an email receipt. They have these neat credit card swipe machines they carry with them (they’re wireless), they check you out where you are in the store, and you get an instant receipt listing your purchase. It’s beautiful! Why can’t restaurants do this too? Why can’t the vehicle emissions and inspection stations do this? Why can’t all stores do this? Why can’t all banks and credit card companies handle everything electronically? My bank (USAA) has been doing it for years, and it works beautifully. Why can’t city and county governments do this? Why can’t mortgage companies do this?
On a larger and more important scale, why don’t hospitals and insurance companies handle EVERYTHING electronically, without any paper of any sort? If you’re a doctor and you have to file claims, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, then your secretary or claims specialist does… You have paper records for everything. Everyone has electronic systems, but very few talk to each other, and paper is still the only way to transfer information. This is pathetic. Hospital information systems ought to be able to send an electronic record of a patient consultation filed by a doctor to that doctor’s medical records system, which in turn ought to be able to process that information and send it to insurance companies electronically, who in turn ought to be able to process that claim and send an electronic notification to the doctor’s medical records system to update the claim status, then issue an electronic funds transfer to that doctor’s bank account. There should be no paper involved whatsoever, but those of us who deal with this stuff know it’s a far cry from it.
If there’s overpopulation, and we’ve got dwindling resources, and forests are being cut down at alarming rates all over the world, why do we have this constant avalanche of paper rolling toward us every month of the year, burying us under? If you’ve got multiple credit cards and bank accounts, a mortgage, a couple of cars, and a business on the side — and it’s your misfortune that the business is a medical one — you’re likely suffocating under paperwork. It’s nuts.
I’d like to congratulate Apple Customer Service for the way they handled the most recent issue with our iMac G5.
If you’re a regular reader, you may know we’ve had problems with our iMac right from the start. Virtually as soon as we brought it home from the Apple Store, we had issues with it. These things got worse with time, and although we took the iMac in for repairs, repeatedly, the problems persisted. I detailed that first set of issues in this post. Several months later, we took it in for service at our local Apple Store, where we had a terrible experience. A few months after that, we took it in for service again, and then, a month or so before Apple Care ran out in late 2008, we took it in for what we hoped would be its last service call.
Unfortunately, it stopped booting up a month after Apple Care ran out. We were packing for what would turn out to be a long trip abroad, and didn’t have time to take it in for service during the 90-day warranty window offered for that last repair. I kept it boxed up, hoping I’d get to it at some point and who knows, perhaps it would auto-magically boot up. I was soured up with the whole affair, and said as much in this post. In three years of using the iMac, we’d had problem after problem, and I felt as if we never got our money’s worth from that machine. I liked it, Ligia liked it, but it just couldn’t be relied upon, and it was a shame.
By the time I got to have a look at it, it was late 2009, about a year later… I followed the steps outlined in this Support Note from Apple, and according to those instructions, the motherboard was at fault, again. I called Apple Support to explain the situation, hoping someone would be kind enough to understand and sympathize. I was very pleasantly surprised when the tech who answered the call wanted to help. He got a hold of one of the senior support engineers, whose name was Christopher, and he was also willing to help. I mention his name because I hope he’ll get some sort of recognition at work for the nice thing he did for me.
Christopher authorized an out-of-warranty repair for our iMac. We were still abroad, but when we got back to the States, I took it in for service, and the folks at the Genius Bar of the Aventura, FL, Apple Store couldn’t have been nicer, too. They did some testing and discovered, to my surprise, that it was only the power supply, and, even better than that, repaired it within hours. I dropped it at the store at 11 am, and got it back by 7 pm, in working order! I was able to boot up our iMac after more than a year and access our documents, photos, emails and more. It was like reuniting with a long-lost friend.
Now that’s my kind of Apple repair experience! I don’t know if my past repair experiences were flukes, or if something changed at Apple since then, but all I can say is that I’m very pleased to see our iMac working again, and I want to congratulate everyone involved in the resolution of this support ticket for being so understanding and so willing to help us. Great job! Thank you!
The Top Gear team visited Romania for a bout of grand touring. They started in resort towns along the Black Sea, like Constanta and Mamaia, then found their way to the famed Transfagarasan mountain highway, by way of Bucharest, the People’s Palace and a bunch of villages inbetween. It was fun to see them drive through the same places and on the same roads I’ve driven on so many times in the past. I’m not sure when they did this show, but it must have been before the appearance of many potholes on the A2 highway — potholes which I struggled to avoid during my recent winter road trip.
I am peeved with their depiction of Romania though. It looks like the Top Gear team sought out a gypsy village on purpose to add some color to the show, but I, and the overwhelming majority of Romanians would say that was a rather distasteful decision. Color and drama could have been added in many other ways. But I digress…
The show ends with a climactic drive on the Transfagarasan highway, during which all three (Jeremy, Richard and James) agree that it’s the best road in the world. Nice.
Who says cats can’t protect us from wildlife attacks? In this video, a house cat chases away a hungry bear from a woman’s porch. That is one brave cat!
[via Holger on FB]
Raoul Pop 