Just this weekend, I noticed calendar entries that Karen put into her iPhone where not ending up on my iPhone. Strange I thought, MobileMe has been consistently working for nearly 6 whole months now, A NEW RECORD! So I logged into the MobileMe website and was met with a cryptic page on the calendar tab that stated my data was unaccessible and that I should contact support.
Amazingly Apple support is available via chat at 8am in the morning. The nice support guy walked me through all the standard reset your data on MobileMe steps (believe me after all the problems with MobileMe last year, I am more than familiar with how to jumpstart MobileMe). Sadly he leaves me hanging with the instructions on how to reset the sync history.
After trying that and meeting with no success, I contact chat again later that afternoon. This time I have to repeat the whole story over again, because the support chat app never emailed me our first chat transcript (I asked it to) and the first support guy never logged it for the next support guy to pick up. Anyway after going through all the steps with the second guy (this time being less patient), he decides to escalate it to a specialist.
I get e-mail from the specialist pretty quickly. I change the MobileMe account password to give the specialist access (BTW: NEVER forget your MobileMe password, if you do, you would have to abandon the account). Then I wait. In the meantime none of our calendars/contacts are available on the phones, so I had to manually sync them via iTunes (it worked, but ICK, everything would get out of sync so I just told Karen to change NOTHING in calendar or contacts).
24 hours late, I get another e-mail from the specialist that he “reset” my account. Sure enough after a few hours of resetting passwords, resetting mobileme cloud data, and then resetting phones and all our laptops, I have everything up and running again.
In the meantime I have explored Spanning Sync — given that I can do this for free with Google Contacts and Calendars (with some significant caveats over MobileMe!) however when it comes time to renew, I’ll think it will finally be time to cut the cord from what I consider the worst value for the money of any Apple product I have every bought.