Last Girl Scout Cookie Season, Riley was out with Berta and Abby at one of the tables they had set up to sell cookies near Acme. He had taken his iPod Touch with him to keep him occupied, and it was doing a good job. As they were cleaning up, he accidentally dropped it on the sidewalk and cracked the screen.

Obviously, Riley was upset because his iPod was broken, and Berta wasn’t inclined to buy another one, since we had gotten the pair of them at a deep discount that was unlikely to happen again. I suggested repair as a possibility, having had friends repair iPhones and the like, so we started down this long road.

The image worked fine, but the glass was broken, so Berta ordered a replacement digitizer with glass. This could have worked fine if I was more delicate with the parts, I suppose, but I cracked the display while trying to remove the old digitizer. Seriously, these things were not designed to be user-serviceable; there is adhesive everywhere inside. Frustrated with the operation, I declared the screen dead, and we had to order a whole new display and digitizer.

The new screen finally came recently. Last night I tried to put the screen in. It worked, but there were some issues. First, in my frustration I apparently chucked the old cracked screen, and the home button along with it. Since the replacement parts don’t come with a new home button, I had to order a new one last night. $5 for a dumb little plastic button I could have saved.

The second problem is that the camera doesn’t work. I must have knocked something out internally when I reassembled the device. This is really disappointing, because the primary reason I got the iPods for the kids was so that they could document their lives in photos/video in a way that I didn’t when I was growing up. If Riley doesn’t have a ready camera, it basically relegates him to using the iPod to play dumb, free petshop games. (Yes, he could use it for other stuff, but he doesn’t.)

In all, we’ve not spent as much in parts as buying a new iPod. But the frustration and time taken to do the repair haven’t taught me anything other than I don’t want to be an iPod/Apple repairman. Maybe next time, I’ll pay an expert to do the repair.