Mon 2 Dec - Paris, France

A significantly quieter day, with a few headaches along the way, but it finished well after all.

The drama... The iPad's battery had been depleted before we went to Montmartre last night. Usually just plug it in and let it recharge. Not this time though. When we came home last night, the iPad battery level was still 1% and it went into an infinite loop... Start up, the Apple apple appears, lock screen appears, iPad shuts down and after a few seconds the whole process started again.

What to do? Online forums provided little advice, and lots of gloomy predictions, and this problem can apparently sometimes happen while iPad was sort of 50% charged. A visit to the Apple store seemed to be the only option.

Here is Hans today reenacting how he felt last night and again this morning.

So, there is an Apple store at 99 Rue Rivoli, which turned out to be underneath the Louvre. Funny that.

That Apple shop provided pisspoor service. Sorry, there is no other description for it.

Hans was told that, yes, he could wait in a totally unstructured queue for a possible, but not guaranteed, chat with a service guy later today. How long is the wait? No idea. There is another Apple shop by the Paris Opera. I could try that but when asked "Will I get serviced today, how long would that queue be?" No idea.

Di, in the mean time, had done some shopping, and arrived while Hans was standing outside the Louvre Apple shop contemplating options.

We decided to get Di an iPad mini, which we had talked about for a while. Back into the shop, and no, not even the sales staff seemed interested. We left this store in disgust and decided to try the Opera shop instead, see below.

Totally different. Plenty of staff, an orderly queue of people needing to talk to service staff with only 5 in front of Hans. Di got serviced very quickly by a very patient young man who admitted that this was only his second day on the job.

In summary, Hans got his iPad charging properly again as they somehow supercharged it so he then plugged it into a shop charger for more cream. In the meantime the young shop assistant, Rafael, was delightful and patient with Di who got all that she needed plus a tax reduction note to be reclaimed at an airport as we were foreigners. Nice. He also spoke excellent English from his 1 year in school in Maryland, USA. Bonus!

A few location shots...

Hans utilizing Apple's facilites to further charge his iPad.

Di outside the Apple shop at the Opera, holding her new plaything in its pretty blue cover...awwh cute.

Well, we did need a photo of something that wasn't iPad related, so a quick "selfie" in front of the Paris Opera.

After several hours with Apple, the time was around 1pm so we decided to go home and have lunch there, recharge Hans' iPad, set up Di's and do other useful stuff like washing. Of course, lots of blogging to catch up on too.

Yesterday was a bit full on so we had dinner at home as Di had purchased some nice fish and vegies at the markets yesterday which became our gourmet dinner.


More wine...and good night.

 

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