#22. or, 1000 pieces of ipod

  About 2 weeks ago, Wyatt, our youngest, busted his ipod. Now, he paid for it himself when he bought it, and we have made a pretty big deal about the responsibility of looking after what is in fact, quite an expensive piece of technology. I know that there are other 12 year old kids out there that already have cell phones, i've seen it myself. He would like a cell phone in the worst way but he's not getting one. Not yet. He has his ipod. He has an app to text from it if he is near a source of wifi, which in his lesson in responsibility, he has had taken away for texting irresponsibly. I guess he's been pretty good with it, until about 2 weeks ago when he made the bad decision to keep it in his pocket when i took him to town to play hockey on the outdoor rink. Now in his defence, he did have at least a partial argument when he said that when he remembered he had it, he didn't want to leave it unattended in his hockey bag in case it got stolen so he decided to keep it in his pocket. Either way, you should know that if you get a hockey puck shot at a pocket containing an ipod, you are going to end up with a 1000 pieces of ipod.

  In an effort to remedy his dilemma with the least amount of cost, we took it to the apple store in the city. They wanted $160 to replace the screen. I thought that i could do better than that. On e-bay, i found a kit with a replacement screen plus the tools to do the job for about $45. That seemed to be reasonable, and me being the handy sort of fellow that i am, we ordered the parts. Last Friday they arrived in the mail.

   Wanting to do the job correctly, and not blindly start ripping and tearing (which used to be how i tackled a lot of jobs) i decided to research the proper procedure on You tube. (because i am so tech-savvy.....ppfftt!) Over the course of at least five instructional videos, none of which were exactly the same, i got to work.  Now, i think i need to point out here that the longest instructional video ran a total of 15 minutes, 28 seconds. piece of cake right? Wrong! it took at least 3 times that just to dig all the broken little shards of glass out of the case! Everything in there is so tiny, i had to get my light thing that goes on my head and makes me look like some kind of urban miner just to see the pieces. I ended up having to take frequent breaks to keep from getting a headache because after 5 minutes of trying to focus on a part smaller than a head of a pin, my eyes would cross and the back of my neck would start to spasm. Four of the five videos instructed to just slightly lift the circuit board up and simply plug in the new screen to the bottom of it. It took me an hour of trying to line up the connections of the plug just to get the screen connected. From start to finish it took at least 3 hours to do the job. A far cry from the 15 minute, 28 second instructional video. But in the end, when we turned it on everything worked the way it was supposed to and Wyatt got his ipod back for $41.89.

..............the new screen is not quite as tight in the case as the original and even though i desperately wanted to, Wyatt would not let me secure it down with Duct Tape. I know it would have worked brilliantly.