One day may be much like the last, but Shabbat still has a different feel to it. There’s Torah Study (this year, we’re looking at the weekly portion with an emphasis on Mordecai Kaplan’s writings and diary), followed by a service. Early in the lockdown, the service was pre-taped, but now most of them are live, as was today’s – it’s much better to be together at the same time, even if we can’t be in the same place. I’ll be leading services and Diane will be chanting Torah in two weeks; as of now, we don’t have a lay Cantor, but I hope someone will volunteer between now and then.

The rest of the day was quiet; we had a Zoom call with friends we haven’t seen in a few months and took a couple of walks. We also watched the National Theatre’s production of Treasure Island – it was OK, but not compelling. The NT videos seem to be refreshing at about 10 frames/second, which gives them a very strange and jerky look, which doesn’t help.

And Apple sent me an email telling me my trade-in was approved and to expect a credit to my card within 5 business days – I’ll reserve judgment until I actually see the money, but things look very hopeful!

I shipped my old MacBook Pro as a trade-in to Apple (actually, an Apple partner) on Day Thirty; they received it on Day Thirty-Six. I expected to hear from them within a few days, but nothing happened, so I got in touch with Apple who told me to hang on a few more days. Nothing happened, so I tried again on Day Fifty-One (Wednesday). The agent tried to figure out what was going on and finally said he’d have to escalate to the trade-in team.

The next evening (Day Fifty-Two), I got an email from the trade-in team telling me to call the actual processor, Phobio. So I did; the recording that answered asked me to press “1” if I was calling about a trade-in initiated during the purchase of a new machine – I pressed “1” and was immediately greeted by “Welcome to Apple Support”. I thought the problem might be that I was calling too late, so I decided to try this morning – same result. My Apple agent this time was even MORE helpful – she tried to call Phobio using some secret method, but, after 45 minutes listening to a dead line, she gave up and escalated me to the trade-in team, having annotated my record even more.

An hour later, I got THE EXACT SAME EMAIL from the trade-in team telling me to contact Phobio. I was not happy. I thought about writing an email to Tim Cook and seeing if that would work, but then I thought about going public and using Twitter. I wrote a polite tweet to @AppleSupport and @PhobioSupport and got a reply from Phobio a few minutes later, asking me to DM them my order number.

Minutes later, I got a DM telling me that they’d submitted the full estimated amount of the trade-in to be posted to my credit card within two weeks. We’ll see.