Back to the Present

A week ago, I went into black hole. On the eve of a work trip to Texas, I decided to download a few movies to my new iPhone to keep me occupied during the long flights. When I connected the phone to iTunes, it asked if I wanted to upgrade the iPhone software to a new version-- 3.0.1. I have only had the phone a month. It was 11 p.m. the night before an 8 a.m. flight to Austin, and I started the upgrade. Big mistake.

The fun began in the middle of the upgrade, about 20 minutes later, when my computer crashed. When it rebooted, it asked to restore the iPhone. That took a ridiculous amount of time, and I restarted the machine again, only to find out that I suddenly had no Internet access.

Now seven hours to my flight, my iPhone crippled and without Internet access in my apartment, I went to bed deflated. I flipped the SIM card back to my old Nokia phone and abandoned iPhone as I left for Austin.

A week later, I am happy to say I am out of the black hole, and that's thanks to great support from Comcast and the Apple Store. You don't hear about good support often, so I figured it was worth outlining here.

When I returned from Texas late Wednesday, I went online and scheduled time at the Apple Store in Cambridge, Mass. at the Genius Bar, which is a cool name for the support desk. I spent an hour at the Genius Bar Thursday night, and a capable technical brought my iPhone back to life.

On Friday morning at work, I posted a Tweet indicating that my iPhone was back, and Comcast Internet was the next issue. A quick back and forth with Comcast support on Twitter, and I decided to recycle the power on the modem.

Now that the dust has settled, it's clear that something must have happened Saturday night to the modem, which proceeded to fry the wireless router in my apartment. Recycling the power on the modem worked, and today I purchased a new wireless router. As of now, everything seems to be working.

For whatever reason, someone didn't want me to bring my iPhone to Texas. And they went to great lengths to stop me from trying, killing my wireless router on the same night my iPhone crashed.

Thanks to both Apple and Comcast support, I am back!