3238. Backblip….

What a day!

I travelled to Dundee for my appointment with Apple at one of their re-seller store (as organised by Apple over the phone) only to be told that they couldn’t deal with my Mac Mini as only an Apple Store could wipe the hard drive once it was encrypted.  They told me to go to Edinburgh instead…not much fun when we’d already gone to Dundee!

So we stopped for a cuppa and I booked an appointment online with Edinburgh for the afternoon and also re-booked my bus to Edinburgh and decided just to catch the bus from Dundee rather than going back via Perth.  Hubby headed home as it seemed silly for him to make the 90 minute journey just to sit around in Edinburgh for what would no doubt turn out to be hours.  He was also absolutely fizzing at Apple for doing this to me so I thought it best just to deal with them on my own!

So, I arrived in Edinburgh and headed to the Apple Store and asked when I got there if I could get an earlier appointment as I had another 90 minutes to wait for my appointment.  The woman I spoke to there was a bit rude and dismissive and when I asked how I would be notified when it was my turn she rolled her eyes at me and said, “Just look at your phone” .  I couldn’t see my phone in my bag and had a little panic that I’d left it on the bus which just caused her to roll her eyes at me again…and she looked at me like I was some dim witted old woman….I was so upset….but my phone was in my bag, I just couldn’t find it in my slight panic mode!  I headed upstairs and sat around for an hour before a lovely guy came over to help me out.  I explained what had happened and he said no problem, he would reset the firmware and that would override the encryption on the drive and then he would re-install the MacOS.  It took about an hour to finalise and he even tested the dock that I’d had trouble with.  I asked him why this had occurred and he looked a bit dubiously at me (an older woman with a good understanding of IT?), so I explained that I had a degree in computing and a background as a systems analyst….that made him smile!  He explained that when the Apple Care advisor had asked me to create a separate volume on the Mac, he hadn’t mentioned that I couldn’t delete it immediately after I’d installed the MacOS until it had completely finished doing all the background parts of the installation…which the advisor had said I could do and this resulted in the drive locking itself…lesson learned…don’t do anything that Apple tell you to do over the phone…book an appointment and take the Mac Mini back to their store!  So I finally arrived back home at 7pm having left the house at 8am yesterday!

So I am relieved that all is now apparently working but last night I just dumped the Mac Mini in the spare room and I will look at setting it back up tomorrow as I have to restore it from my backup drive and I can’t face it today!