iPod Lesson the Long Way

I spent 4 hours at Best Buy today, and no, I wasn't Christmas shopping. I stopped in there on my way home from work (after having a nice little lunch with Randy at Northwoods... yummm...) to have them take a look at the iPod adapter in my car. A few weeks ago I went through a huge fiasco to get my old car stereo re-installed in my car, and added an iPod adapter so that I could listen to my iPod through my car's sound system. (The crappy FM tuner adapter thing works but the sound quality is crap). Last night, as I got home and unplugged my iPod, the thing did something funky on the screen. Then today when I got in the car and plugged in the iPod, it wouldn't load up through the stereo. It just sat there stuck on the "Loading..." screen.

So I went to Best Buy and explained what was happening. The guy said it was probably the adapter (some box-like thing that's installed under my seat of my car or behind the dashboard or in some other weird place), but that if it wasn't the adapter, it was my stereo. It was the same guy who finally had successfully installed this stuff last time, so he remembered me. He took my car in right away and went to work on replacing the iPod adapter.

But that didn't fix the problem. So he told me that the AUX port on my stereo must have blown out. Well, shit. So I went inside and dropped $300 on the cheapest Kenwood iPod-supporting car stereo they had in stock. I brought it back to the guy, and he installed it...

Still didn't work. WTF???

To make an already-too-long story short, all he had to do (or, all I had to do) was reboot the iPod. Once we figured out how to reset the iPod (with the help of Google on my Blackberry and a night shift guy who'd come in to work), everything worked again. The guy put my old stereo back in, and gave me the new stereo to bring back inside to return.

So, I got my money back, and my stereo and iPod are working again, thanks to 4 hours of wasted time. That's OK though. The guy didn't charge me a dime, and was very cool (not to mention, patient) about the whole thing. I think we both learned a little something from the experience!

For reference, rebooting the iPod involved holding down the center button and the menu key. I wish I'd have thought of that last night, but since the iPod itself was working just fine, I didn't think of it. Actually I was thinking that the adapter box needed rebooting. Anyhoooo....

Check out my Vegas trip reports - I'm home and tired as hell!