Rant: Stupid iPod Craps Out on Other Side of Globe

I love my iPod and usually put it in the near-perfect gadget category, which is why it was my music and media player of choice to bring to India, where I am now. It's a long trip to get over here—about 20 hours each way—so I loaded my 80GB iPod with pretty much my entire Mac desktop music library, as well as the fruits of a bit of a pre-trip iTunes shopping binge (Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, a bunch of This American Life Episodes, The Office Season 3, The Real Housewives of Orange County, Tetris, and much, much more).

It's served me pretty well until today. I get to the treadmill at the hotel where I'm staying and what do I see but a message, in at least three languages, that reads: Connect to your computer. Use iTunes to restore.

My usual trick of resetting the iPod doesn't work, so I go online to see what's up. Apple's web site says this happens to 5G iPods and I do indeed need to connect the thing to my computer. Trouble is, my Mac is back on the other side of the globe, so I'm essentially screwed, not to mention forced to have some slightly more boring workouts, since my iPod Nano is so last year in terms of the limited music lineup I have on it.

I've gone online to see if anyone else has this problem and haven't seen any solutions, only mo' problems, so I'm hoping I'm one of the lucky souls for whom Apple's reassuring solution works. I won't really know how dire my situation is until I get back home next week, but in the meantime, if anyone can shed any light on this annoyance—like what caused it and how do I prevent this from happening on my next trip—let me know.

My only theory is that I dropped my backpack earlier today, and my iPod was in it. Since it's essentially a hard drive with movable parts, the iPod can break with the wrong kind of shock, but that's not what others with this problem have reported. For some reason, I took it out of the shock-protecting iFrogz case I wrote about last year, and look what happened!

It makes me happy that I brought along my Nano, which uses more shock-resistant Flash memory (no moving parts).

Now, normally I'd say this is a deal breaker, but since my iPod has been so trustworthy until now, I'll give it a break. Besides, I could do some book reading instead of all that TV-show-watching and audiobook-listening. But if this happens again, I'm not sure there's any hope in the digital audio player universe (in other words, I expect non-iPods to crap out on me, so I always bring a backup).  

If music companies call Steve Jobs's bluff about getting rid of DRM for online song purchases, they'll help me not care so much in the future since my iTunes tunes won't be stuck on one far-away computer.

Is there anybody out there who has had this problem and has resolved it successfully? If so, let me know what happened.

Related links:

My Favorite iPod Cases