Totally. We golf with organic golf balls and that Feist chick follows us around singing until we drop her a fix.

So early on in this process I was really cranky. I was especially cranky when I had concluded that installing iTunes 7.7.1 had generated the problem. It made me especially cranky because everything was working great before, and along comes Apple and kicks sand into my phone.

I also had a big-picture problem with the whole thing. And I had been talking about that “big picture” on the Apple support forums. Unfortunately those “big picture” items were being deleted my moderators. This made me crankier. I sort of felt that the backdrop was helpful to us folks thinking about how to deal with the problem. I felt techniques learned on my other jailbroken phone might be useful. The moderators sent me emails saying my techniques involved “speculation” and “non-supported” methods. This was interesting to me. Or enraging. You pick. The only conclusion at the time was that Apple supported its ability to break your things, but not the user’s ability to do what figuring he needed to do to fix. By then, I had the rage. Seasoned, good rage.

Okay, listen. I like Apple. Go figure. I’m not going to spend a million sentences defending that. But I’m not an apologist when they screw up. iTunes 7.7.1 was a screw up. And it fit into a bigger picture of their deployment decisions. So, I wrote sjobs@apple.com to talk about it. Who knew the brother reads consumer emails.

And he wrote me back. Interestingly, not knowing more about Jobs’ email habits, I convinced it was from him (or somebody doing a really good job at mimicking him), because of the grammar, syntax, the crispness (while still friendly), and the lack of corporate filler (“Thank you for writing”, “We appreciate your concern”). Turns out I was right.

So, I wrote him back. I sent him several links to threads and basically asked him to ask engineering to consider that there may be a separate bug they’re not yet aware of.

Within a day a very nice representative from Executive Relations was on the horn with me. At this point, I hadn’t gone through all my steps. For me, a key element in being able to bring to the conversation “We know it’s iTUnes 7.7.1, and we found a method to stop the madness”, and that depended on, oh.. actually having a tested method. So, I let the messages go unreturned for about four days. We had some emails back and forth, and then we finally spoke. She was very kind, but also very open to frank talk. This might have to do with the fact that I’m not an asshole. But more on that later.

The results of the conversation were that she asked for any information on any steps I had performed. I referred her to the forum since anything I had in my work notes were there. Yeah, I keep notes of that stuff. Lame.

Now that I think of it, I should have sent her a refined version of my notes. The thread is a little bogged down with the process of discovery and disappointment. Still, I should be hearing from her soon. So, we’ll see what happens.

I think it’s possible that I may have had more caché when communicating with Apple because, from the go, I represented myself as not just a tech-panicked bug victim. I also represented myself as a stockholder. There is a different level of interest for anybody who owns stock in a company. This is just speculation. It could be that anybody friendly enough would have gotten a good response.

Still, I was very encouraged that representatives from Apple were not only so forward, but also so involved. What they do on their end, I’m not sure. But, it was nice to experience, and I look forward to another call from them today or tomorrow.