This past Saturday, I had a couple gigs up on Chicago’s North Shore. These two customers were literally just down the street from each other, which always makes it more worthwhile to hike up there (it’s really not all that far). The first customer just purchased a Brother Multi-Function Laser Printer (she expressly did not want an Inkjet MFP), and wanted help setting it up. I’ve had a flurry of this type of unbox and setup type of work lately, which I don’t really mind, although I secretly shake my head at why people just can’t take a DIY approach. Money in my pocket, I suppose.

At any rate, this was actually a tougher unbox and setup than most. The client had just remodeled their kitchen, and wanted the MFP laser installed in an under-counter storage cabinet with a slide out drawer. This wasn’t totally a surprise, because I’d already done a quick visit with them several weeks previous and measured the dimensions of the space, recommending the Brother MFP as the best make and model for the given space. The drawer in the cabinet was plenty big enough, and once I removed the top shelf, there was plenty of vertical space. More importantly, it was very well put together and should have no problem supporting the weight of the MFP unit. I’d advised the client have their electrician place a power outlet in the back of the cabinet and to drill holes between the other cabinet walls all the way over to where her built in desk was.

So what was so tough about this job? Threading the USB and phone cables through the back of the cabinets. I guess I’m getting too old (read: Out of Shape) to stand on my hands and knees doing this kind of stuff. After removing most of the drawers in the cabinets, I had enough room to fish the cables through. The corner cabinet, which made the bend to where the desk was, proved to be the most challenging. My arm was just not long enough to reach the last hole where the cable came out underneath the desk. Fortunately, the client was willing to pitch in, and she was just small enough to get her entire shoulder into the cabinet opening, and as she pushed the cable through, I was able to snag and pull it all the way through. Then it was a simple matter of putting the cables through the grommet hole in the desk, where her laptop’s USB port and the phone jack awaited. I had the foresight to have her get a 10 ft USB cable and 12 ft phone cable, which proved to be just long enough. Once the cables were in place, I just had to install the MFP Printer software and utilities, which went without a hitch. I then did some test printing and faxing to make sure everything worked, and presto, on to my next gig.

So I pull down the block to client #2. This should be a quick one (why do I always jinx myself?!). It was a follow-up visit to a household that had just purchased two brand new 20″ Intel iMacs for their kids. I’d already set them both up a couple weeks earlier, but one of them had been unboxed and setup before I got there, and whoever did it (the man of the house, I imagine) plugged in a password during the first boot up and then they forgot what that password was. I would have stuck around to boot off the Mac OS X Setup DVD, which allows you to reset passwords on various accounts, but I had to rush to another client that had some time constraints. I vowed to return again to reset the password and do the couple of software installs that needed to happen.

And return I did, with the vision in my head of being in and out of there in mere minutes. So I power up the Mac, pop in the OS X Setup DVD that came with it, and hit the “C” key to force it to boot off the DVD. It booted up from the hard drive. Strange. So I hit the eject button on the keyboard, and the disc didn’t come out. Hmmm. Even stranger was that the icon for the DVD didn’t appear on the desktop. So I restarted and held down the mouse button, another way of forcing the Mac to cough up the disk. Nothing doing… it just would not eject it. I know I inserted it the correct way — and even if I had it facing the wrong way, the drive would recognize that and immediately eject it. But it sucked it right in when I first inserted it. And what’s even stranger is that when I looked under the System Profiler utility, it indicated that there were no optical drives present. Well, that would explain why it wouldn’t eject the disc, wouldn’t it?

I blew a call into Apple support to see if they had any ideas, and after trying mostly what I already had tried, we agreed the iMac needed to be brought back in to the store for warranty service. It was disappointing to me, as I’ve setup dozens of Macs, and have never seen a brand new one like this have such a major failure. So I broke the news to the client, who took it all in stride. I told her I could crack the case open and poke around myself, it could be something as simple as a loose connector… but that I was hesitant to do so and risk voiding the warranty. So I told her to bring it back to the Apple Store she purchased it from and they hopefully can fix it quickly (I told her to have them reset the password at the same time).

I’m not down on the Apple brand at all. I still think they are so elegantly engineered compared to the typical Windows desktop. Lemons happen. Let’s hope it’s the last lemon I see that isn’t hanging from the edge of my glass of iced tea!