Poisoned Apple

The company whose customer service I hate the most, with a passion, is Comcast.  But a close second is Apple, and I’ve had to deal with them recently.  For some reason, yesterday evening the Podcast app on my iPod Touch started crashing a few seconds after I open it.  And now it does it every time – and I can’t listen to anything.  This is an absolute disaster – I rely on listening to podcasts on my commute and at work, and will probably cancel my road trip this weekend if it’s not working.  So I spent a few hours on a chat service with Apple support late last night, and a further hour on the phone with them at work this morning – getting transferred from one service advisor to another, speaking to technical support people higher and higher up the chain, and trying all kinds of fixes and workarounds, but still not restored things to how they were.  And because they reset my iPod, I think I might have lost all my saved progress on all my other Apps as well.  This is a disaster.  For example, all my hard-earned progress on Angry Birds Pop has now gone.  And we are talking hours and hours and hours of gameplay.  Tragedy.  I think this might be another sign that I need a new iPhone, and if so then I should use that to start listening to podcasts and suchlike rather than some antiquated iPod Touch.