If I’m understanding the reports on the iTunes developer website correctly (and it’s entirely possible I’m not), iProv has been downloaded nearly 1,000 times in the 5 days since its release. Primarily in the U.S., but also Canada and the rest of the world as well, including (more surprisingly) many non-English speaking countries. Not bad for an application with a very narrow audience… especially since it doesn’t show up in any lists on iTunes that I’ve seen, so unless you’re searching specifically for it, you won’t find it. I’ve spread the word in a couple online improv communities but I wasn’t expecting it to reach a tenth of that many people, especially in its first week. I just wish I could find out more about the folks who’ve been downloading it.
My attempts to get my washer repaired have been frustrating. I called a company on Thursday, and after spending several minutes setting up an appointment they informed me they couldn’t work on a washer that had a dryer stacked on top of it. So I canceled the appointment, called another company and was grateful when they told me that they would be able to send someone out later the same day, they would call to set up the appointment and the stacked washer/dryer wasn’t a problem.
Only, I never heard back from them. So I hit redial on my phone the next day and called them back to find out what had happened. After much confusion they said they had me in their records, but that I had canceled because of the stacked unit problem. Realizing I must have accidentally dialed the first company instead of the second, I apologized profusely and dialed the other number in my phone, which after another bout of confusion I realized had taken me to the exact same company.
After some furious scouring on the Internet to try and figure out just who I’d been calling the other day, I realized that there were multiple listings of companies with different names and phone numbers but all operating out of the same address, and they were actually aliases for a single company. So what had in fact happened the previous day was that I had phoned the same company twice on two different numbers, with two completely different results. It just seemed they had conveniently forgotten about the second time.
I’ve since made an appointment for Tuesday with what I’ve confirmed is an entirely different company that says they can handle the stacked washer/dryer. Hopefully there won’t be more surprises… I need to do laundry.
I had some friends over last night and amidst a few too many drinks and stories from our youths, I became acutely aware of how much events that are much more significant to us as children than they are to the grown-ups around us can stick with us and affect who we are as adults. Their stories triggered me to tell a story I’d never told anyone before, not because I was embarrassed by it so much as it had never seemed important or interesting enough to tell. I actually surprised myself that I had never told it to anyone before, though, and was in fact so surprised that I want to retell it here before I forget about it again.
Read more tales of awkwardness…
Dan.