My fire tablet has been behaving strangely. One morning, the time was wrong and couldn’t be reset manually. I checked online and somebody said that it’s because of the synchronization error between the tablet and the wifi router. I didn’t even know there’s any communication between the tablet and the wifi beyond the internet connection. Now I knew–the relationship is not as simple as I thought. Soon this was resolved, the audible books started to act up. It used to be that books on the tablet, kindle or audible, can remember the page you read last time and automatically show you the right place to resume your reading. Then the audible books stopped doing that. Every time you go back to the book, it starts from the very beginning. That’s rather annoying since I had to search for the page I last read and it’s almost impossible to do that on an audio file. Fortunately things went back to normal two weeks later as if the tablet caught a flu and cured itself with its own immune system.
Then last night, something of a more serious nature happened. The library page of books refuses to open. It used to be that you touch “book” and then touch “library”, a list of pictures of your books show up, from which you can select whichever book you want to open. Now it flashes the list for two seconds and jumps back to the home screen. I checked online, but nobody asks similar questions; I turned the tablet on and off several times, only to see the problem reappearing.
Amazon chat is convenient and I was chatting with S, who has a long, exotic name. I can imagine S a beautiful Asian lady. With such a name, the person has to be beautiful to deserve it, though for all the practical purposes I should desire her to be competent, more than anything else. She has to be an Asian since it’s almost midnight here in New Jersey. My chat buddy has to be located in Asia somewhere. I stated my problem and she fell silent for a while before send me the message to ask me to check if I can download books all right. I downloaded a sample book and it worked fine. Then she asked me to hook up to another wifi and download again. At first I was not sure I understood her. I only have one wifi at home and at midnight, it is impossible for me to hook myself up to another wifi, unless I break into somewhere, which I had no wish to do. It’s not that the impossibility of the operation is annoying, but rather her request seemed weird. What I was having seemed to be a tablet problem, not a wifi issue. It’s no use to argue with her, so I pretended that I hooked up to another wifi and made another download of a sample book. My fake report seemed to satisfy her. Then she said something like, “would you like to have a replacement?” I was a little shocked. There’s nothing wrong with the hardware of my tablet. If anything, it’s the software that’s having problems. The replacement of hardware is obviously not the solution. In addition, how could she jump from troubleshooting the wifi and download, which were probably irrelevant to my problem but at least qualified as a valid problem solving process, to tablet replacement so quickly?
Just as I was wondering how to give her my reply, I realized that my tablet was back to normal. The library of books showed up steady just like before, as if nothing wrong had ever happened. So I told her so. She congratulated me. I told her no replacement is necessary and we ended our conversation. Five minutes later, my tablet started to act up again and the jumping library came back as bad as before.
Now I had this Amazon evaluation on my screen asking me if my problem is solved and how I was to rate the service. I had a feeling that behind the sexy name my chat buddy is not very competent, but it is hard for me to badmouth about her. It is not really a badmouth, but rather it is a truthful reflection that she is not as good at her job as she should be. Still I hesitated. What if she got this job because of her beauty and youth, because it’s an opportunity for her to leave her hometown to work in a big city. If she were to lose this job, she may have to go back to the hopeless life she had before. At least with this job, she could continue with whatever she has been planning and dreaming another dream and becoming a more useful member of the society. My evaluation might have worse consequence than I anticipated. But I can’t give her a glowing evaluation, can I? That will be lying. So I chose to say nothing and closed my laptop to go to bed.
Haoyan Do 