My iPad saga--Or how I should have moved to Germany

So yesterday after lunch/dinner I decided to take the plunge and pick up an iPad. I had been going back and forth between the 32gig and the 64gig 3G version all day. Wasn't sure which one to get. Not sure if I wanted to spend the extra $100. Then I realized that I would need Applecare and it was going to be $100. So since I hadn't budgeted more than $1000 I would just get the 32gig and that would be it. I could stay under budget by $100 and that would leave me $$$ for apps and a case.

So thrilled as any long-time Mac user can be I get home, plug it into my Mac and lo and behold, it comes up in German. Well it may have not been German but it was a Slavic language of some kind. Really strange since the iPad is not supposed to be available in any country outside the US. I probably could have put this on e-bay in one of those countries and made a fortune.

So, I figure that someone has changed the language on it and so I went to change the language back. Only problem was, I couldn't tell what to push to find English. It was all in a foreign language, right? So I called Apple Tech Support at Apple (not the Apple Store where I bought it--I figured they were busy as when I had been there). I got right through but they couldn't tell me how to do it other than to say choose this (International) and that (language) but the problem was, I couldn't find it. It wasn't in English.

I asked them to count down from the top menu on their English iPads and just tell me which one to push. I had figured that I would be on the call for about three minutes. Pretty simple stuff. That's when I found out that the people doing tech support for iPads don't have iPads. WTF? They don't have iPads?

That's the case. After being on hold for almost an hour and being shuffled from one tech support person to another I was finally upgraded to a tech support supervisor who told me that yes, it's true, that they don't have iPads to do support on. They also do support on iPhones and don't have those either. What they have is a database which supposedly have all the answers on them. WTF? But that meant they couldn't just look at an iPad screen and tell me which button to push.

I finally got a support supervisor who asked me to restore my software for the iPad from scratch. That took about 20 minutes and I got it done. Restarted the iPad and... it restored it in German (or whatever language I had in the first place).

She told me she couldn't help and that I should just take the iPad back and exchange it. So back to the Apple Store at Bellevue Square I went. (About a 30 minute drive.) Got there and found a manager and explained what had happened.

We booted the iPad and sure enough, no English. In the meantime one of the guys I know that works it there and that I talk to whenever I go in, came up and told the manager to "be nice to this guy, he has sold a few Macs for us." I am guessing he said that because I often go there while Kathleen shops and tell people how much I love my Macs.

So the manager says, let me take back your German 32Gig iPad (that isn't even supposed to exist yet) and let me give you a new one. And let me credit you the $99 for the AppleCare. So I tell him, if you are going to do that, then I will spend that extra $99 on the 64Gig iPad. He says, "let's do that." and I came home with a 64Gig iPad completely covered by Apple Care for the $$$ amount I had budgeted for the 32 in the first place. A huge thanks to Brandon at the Apple Store at Bellevue Square for taking such good care of me.

We checked the new one at the store to make sure it was in English. Then I was on my way home. Got there, plugged it into my iMac and because I had done a restore on that computer it started to restore the new iPad in German. I yanked the cord, moved it to my Mac Pro and restored it to English.

So now I have a synced 64Gig, 3G iPad that I am very impressed with. Have downloaded a bunch of free apps (and a couple of paid ones) as well as a few iBooks (also free). Loving it.

And that's my iPad saga. Lots of fun.