I often use my iPod at work to break up the monotony. Imagine my disbelief when I pulled my prized bit of shiny Cupertino gadgetry from my backpack last night and discovered that it wouldn't start up. I wrote it off to an accidental bump in the backpack that started it playing and ran the batteries out, so I went down to the gallery's restaurant and borrowed their iPod charger. I plugged the iPod in and it wouldn't get past an illuminated Apple logo. Putting it to my ear, I heard the hard drive clicking. (That's usually a bad sign.) At that point, I was thanking my lucky stars that I bought AppleCare for it, as the standard warranty expired several months ago.

This afternoon, I scheduled a Genius Bar appointment for tomorrow. As a last resort before taking it in, I decided to hook it up to the computer again and try to run utilities on it. Interestingly enough, Disk Utility reported the drive to be OK. Sure enough, I unmounted the iPod and gave it a quick test, which it passed with flying colors.

Only at that point did I breathe a sigh of relief and cancel my slot at the Genius Bar.