Sometimes I hate iTunes.

Like today, for instance. I have all my music stored losslessly on an external, network drive, so that any device in the flat can access it, and I can get at it from anywhere with an internet connection. It’s quite slick.

But being a network, occasionally it can flake out a bit, so iTunes might temporarily be unable to find the drive, or something like that. It happens. No big deal.

Unless you attempt to sync your iPhone/iPod/iThing while it’s having one of these snafus, at which point it will arbitrarily wipe everything from the phone because it can’t find its networked twin. So sure is the program that this digital apocalypse is what I’d wanted that it doesn’t even trouble you with the option of, say, not deleting the entire device.

Which anti-genius came up with this idiocy as a default behaviour? Actually, it is best that I don’t know, for then I would have to kill them.

Do excuse me. I need to go and watch a progress bar progress very slowly as it re-encodes and copies three and a half thousand songs.

Thanks, Apple! You bunch of fudds!