There was a moment this evening when I wanted to get down on my hands and knees and beg. I was ready to pay any penalty to get out of our current contract. I was ready to see if I could find any takers on eBay for my mint TAM. I was ready to do anything my wife wanted, for the opportunity to replace my Palm TX with an iPhone. Sure, the iPhone would replace my cell phone and iPod too, but they didn’t cost me three hours of my life this evening (and that’s not counting the wear and tear).

You see, my Palm is my life at work; and because it’s so important to me, I sync it regularly with my Mac. In fact, it just so happens I was doing it again this evening.

I normally know my way around a computer, but somehow I managed to delete my work calendar – and not just on my Palm, but on the iMac, my .Mac account, and on the PowerBook (all of which sync together through the magic of .Mac).

Only today it was black magic.

If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how I’m so sure it’s the Palm’s fault. Couldn’t have just as easily been the Mac, .Mac, or (gasp) the user?

The thing is, I’m partly to blame. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s true. I’ve been using The Missing Sync, from Mark/Space, but it’s been giving me lots of trouble lately. So, I decided to switch back to the Palm Hotsync manager. I should have backed up my Address Book and iCal databases, but I didn’t. I should have stopped when OS X sync services warned me that 250 contacts on my computer were about to be altered. I should have grown a little weary when it said more than 10% of my tasks were going to be affected. In my defense, that’s partly why I was getting rid of The Missing Sync. It was constantly giving me these warnings, even when very little had changed. I’d done a couple test syncs, to see if I could determine what it was doing, but I couldn’t. So it’s ironic that I was switching away from one application, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the computer crying wolf one too many times, then I disregard the warning the first time I use the new (older) software. I got fudged over real good friends.

I could blame my TX. I could blame Mark/Space. I could blame the Palm Software. I could blame .Mac.

But all of this is why I was SO ready to switch to the iPhone this evening: seamless integration. With my Palm, I think there may have been too many chiefs in the kitchen, if you know what I mean. In that sense, I was ready to chuck the hard to use beasty. Every time I plug in my iPod, I think it should be that easy for my Palm. The iPod syncs with my calendars and contacts (albeit one way, since you can’t make notes on my iPod). It also pulls in relatively large audio files, and at a fraction of the time or effort it takes with my Palm (just to synchronize a few tasks and calendar items).

Now I’ve got to recreate 6 months of appointments… somehow. Tomorrow is going to be a lot of fun.