The winter here has been mild so far, some nice warm days, some rainy days. But today it suddenly turned a lot colder. I wore 2 hoodies beneath my coat and it was still cold. They said it would snow (yay) but it didn’t really (boo).

And it was in that context that my ipad decided to break. It was crashing with a purple stream. Initially just a couple of times a day, but by yesterday I couldn’t even type my passcode without it breaking.

So I trundled along to the Apple Store to see what was up. Of course, it seemed to work absolutely fine while I was in there. No sign of a problem, which kinda turned out to be a good thing. Maybe – I’m still not sure if it was a scam.

They said that there was no real way to fix ipads, so the best might be to get a refurbished unit or something. However, they said the best bet might be for me to trade in the existing model and get a new one, and that would probably work out cheaper. Fortunately, they had found nothing wrong with the existing model so this seemed like an opportunity.

And then it went a bit weird. He got the kit so he could start doing the photos for the trade in. I took the screen protector off and he said on the very bottom of the screen their might be a light scratch, and that he would go and get a screen cleaning kit, to get rid of it.

And then nothing. For a long time. I just sat there. I started looking around eventually and a manger type finally came up to me and said that they guy who had dealt with me had been coughing and introduced me to a different guy that was going to help.

Now I’m not saying that this was suspicious, but the new guy was very much ‘I’m here to help you with your trade in’ and didn’t mention the broken ipad at all. So I don’t know if there was some shenanigans going on. Anyway, hopefully the guy recovered from his coughing fit.

It was all plain sailing from there. Except it wasn’t. having taken all the photos of my old ipad and had them AI’d – the system decided that it was in very poor condition and offered me £0 for trade in. Fortunately the guy decided that this was a mistake and went through it again.

And so, a lot of money down the drain (I will spare you the details), and I now have a new working ipad. Very similar to the old one. Almost not different. Apparently its a bit faster.

Happy days.