Zuneless, Three Days over Two Years

Along with hundreds of thousands of others, I hit a snag in my everyday life on New Years' Eve. My Microsoft Zune MP3 player stopped working. The 30 megabyte models produced in 2006 had a simple but profound programming flaw: they couldn't handle the fact that 2008 had been a leap year. The 30 MB Zunes all froze on December 31 when the clock found itself in limbo between 2008, according to one of its calendars, and 2009, which would begin in 24 hours according to another of its calendars.

Unfortunately, I was one of the first to discover this, before Microsoft analyzed the problem and posted a solution, which was to simply wait until after noon Greenwich Mean Time on January 1 and reattach the Zune to the computer. I thought I could reset the Zune myself by opening it up and unplugging the battery for a few seconds. I found unofficial instructions on how to do this online (thus voiding the warranty, but I think it had expired anyway). I took some pride in prying it open for the first time. But unplugging the battery not only failed to fix the problem, it meant Microsoft's easy solution of waiting until after noon GMT on January 1 would no longer work for me.

It was complex and frustrating, but finally, thanks to some instructions posted online by others who had made the same mistake, I regained control of the Zune on January 2. I then had to reinstall the device's firmware and all my music and video files, which was a small price considering the frustration I had endured over the previous three days.

The lessons? Most important was the one they teach medical students early: "Don't just do something, stand there." Once I discovered it was a widespread problem, waiting for Microsoft to tell me what to do would have been a lot smarter than being proactive (i.e., destructive). I'm glad I know what the inside looks like now, but it wasn't worth the trouble.

Second, like the NASA engineers who goofed and crashed a Mars probe because of a conflict between the metric and English systems of measurement, software engineers (and all other humans, myself included) are capable of overlooking the most obvious issues, like February 29ths. Imagine if the same engineers had built this problem into a car's computer. The car wouldn't have worked for a day and might well have stopped in the middle of the road.

Third, buying hardware from Microsoft is now something I'm probably never going to consider. The Zune (a gift, for which I remain very grateful) works very well when it works, but I'm not going to be able to purge my memory of these three days if I'm ever in the market for anything Microsoft makes for which they have a viable competitor. They've promised to fix the Zune's leap year problem by 2012, but if mine's still working then, I'm going to give it New Years Eve off.