GLITCH

My friend Barry tells a story about a visit to New York some time ago. It seems that, as his wife and daughter were in a subway station awaiting their train, they espied a rat lurking down by the tracks. Not an altogether unusual sight in the New York subways... but what was unusual was the fact that the rat was clutching a can of Pepsi-Cola in its little rat mitts and was holding it up to its little rat face, gulping it down in an altogether human manner.

To this day, Barry regrets not having been there with them, camera ready to hand. That image would have been worth a fortune to a competitor with a big advertising budget and a snarky sense of humor. “Pepsi - preferred by New York subway rats five-to-one!”

What made me think of this story was the recent iPhone alarm app glitch.

On the morning of New Year’s Day, SWMBO found that her iPhone’s alarm clock did not go off. Not a big deal on a Saturday or Sunday, because we get up at pretty much the same time every day out of sheer habit, but still, it was a mystery that wanted solving. Had she somehow not set the thing properly? Set it for p.m. instead of a.m.? Had the ringer been turned off? Inquiring minds needed to know... because come Monday, that alarm’s ability to get our asses out of bed would be much more critical.

It turns out that we were not the only ones who had this problem. iPhone users everywhere reported that their alarms did not function after the turn of the year, in some cases causing great consternation on the part of the users. Missed appointments, showing up late for work, that sort of thing. The fault lay with a subtle OS4 software-related glitch that caused the alarm app to fail on January 1 or 2. As more reports came streaming in - thousands of people were impacted - it became clear that only alarms that had been set to go off on a one-time basis were affected; repeating alarms were OK.

Andy Borowitz lampooned Apple with a faux-news piece about Apple having to cancel a press conference to address the glitch when Steve Jobs failed to show, owing to his having overslept when his iPhone alarm malfunctioned. Heh.

Meanwhile, Droid owners reported no alarm-related problems. And that made me think of the rat with the Pepsi can...

...because Apple has graciously handed the Droid folks a gift equivalent to handing an 8x10 glossy of a Pepsi-drinking subway rat to the good folks at Coca-Cola. I wonder if they’ll be snarky enough to use it.

Do you have an iPhone? Miss any appointments last weekend?