Frustrated with Apple Care service
in [Mac Applications]
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From: KentSteve on 23 Nov 2006 20:42 Took my computer to an Apple-authorized service center last Tuesday for hard-drive problems that the Apple hardware test tool identified. On the basis of this ID, I was told by Apple to take it in. The Apple guy (a service center with only one Apple tech) was out that day at a service call. He looked at it the next day. His own diagnosis took until the end of the next day day. (Was he also culturing strep bacteria off the keyboard?) He determined what we'd already determined: needs a new hard drive. He ordered it and said it would be in Tuesday (two days ago). I wasn't allowed to take the computer back home meanwhile (where I was happily running it from an external hard drive) as he said that would require him to close the ticket -- Apple policy. Fine. Hard drive didn't show up Tuesday as promised. He said it would be Friday. "With the holidays and all." Huh? If I'd ordered a new computer from the Apple Store, it damn well would have arrived, along with the credit card bill. I mean, if there's one thing that's dependable these days it's the entrepreneurial courier companies. So the hard drive will be in tomorrow. Will the computer be fixed tomorrow? No. Nobody's coming in the store tomorrow, and only two hours on Saturday. Apparently my computer, with its guts exposed on some bench, doesn't merit attention from the tech until Monday. Will it be ready Monday? No. He said it will be Tuesday. Who the hell knows why. I bought the three-year Apple Care policy, but I never bothered to look whether labor is paid for. If it's not, and I'm out $100 or $200 for his painstaking determination of the problem I had already identified -- and for his indifference to the notion of timely service -- I'm going to refuse to pay it. I could have bought a third-party hard drive and put the beast in myself rather than deal with these twits. They're the kind of passive-aggressive tech-heads we're all familiar with -- in fact, some of you are just like them -- and I'm going to make sure Steve Jobs is aware of them. So he can roll up his sleeves -- wait, he always has his mock-turtleneck sleeves pushed up, 1980s style -- and troubleshoot the problem. Happy Thanksgiving.
From: J.J. O'Shea on 23 Nov 2006 22:42 On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 20:42:44 -0500, KentSteve wrote (in article <1164332564.041829.255380(a)l12g2000cwl.googlegroups.com>): [trollery snipped] Assuming that your story has any truth to it, given your attitude as shown here and on the guitar groups, I suspect I know why you're being made to wait. And, if it was me who was fixing your machine, you'd be waiting a whole lot longer. -- email to oshea dot j dot j at gmail dot com.
From: Dave Balderstone on 23 Nov 2006 23:23 In article <0001HW.C18BD440006F95B0F058A530(a)news1.news.adelphia.net>, J.J. O'Shea <try.not.to(a)but.see.sig> wrote: > On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 20:42:44 -0500, KentSteve wrote > (in article <1164332564.041829.255380(a)l12g2000cwl.googlegroups.com>): > > [trollery snipped] > Assuming that your story has any truth to it, given your attitude as shown > here and on the guitar groups, I suspect I know why you're being made to > wait. And, if it was me who was fixing your machine, you'd be waiting a whole > lot longer. Oh, I could tell stories from my days as a tech in an Apple-authorized store many moons ago. Weeks, we made some pricks wait, when we'd repaired their box 20 minutes after they brought it in. And they deserved it, every one...
From: KentSteve on 23 Nov 2006 23:38 Your suspicions are quite wrong. The technician's approach to my case has nothing to do with his perceptions of my personality, because he has none. I handed the machine to an administrative assistant and have had only perfunctory phone contact with nameless employees, with whom I've been uniformly patient and courteous. Their response has been to imply, in a passive-aggressive manner, that the "service" process in no way takes into account the needs of Apple customers, some of whom have only one computer and are desperate to have it fixed. The process instead depends on a combination of the tech's sketchy attendance at work, the center's indifference to its customers' needs (or should I say the center's childish impulse to ration its response to its customers' needs), and, apparently, Apple's inability to get a hard drive to its service center in less than a week, despite all the advantages of courier services that could deliver a new machine to me literally tomorrow if I were willing to pay for it, Thanksgiving be damned. Now, assuming my story does have truth to it, do you disagree that nearly two weeks is too long to wait for a defective hard drive to be fixed under Apple Care? On Nov 23, 9:42 pm, J.J. O'Shea <try.not...(a)but.see.sig> wrote: > On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 20:42:44 -0500, KentSteve wrote > (in article <1164332564.041829.255...(a)l12g2000cwl.googlegroups.com>): > > [trollery snipped] > Assuming that your story has any truth to it, given your attitude as shown > here and on the guitar groups, I suspect I know why you're being made to > wait. And, if it was me who was fixing your machine, you'd be waiting a whole > lot longer. > > -- > email to oshea dot j dot j at gmail dot com.
From: Shawn Hirn on 23 Nov 2006 23:47
In article <1164332564.041829.255380(a)l12g2000cwl.googlegroups.com>, "KentSteve" <kentsteve2005(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > Took my computer to an Apple-authorized service center last Tuesday for > hard-drive problems that the Apple hardware test tool identified. On > the basis of this ID, I was told by Apple to take it in. The Apple guy > (a service center with only one Apple tech) was out that day at a > service call. He looked at it the next day. His own diagnosis took > until the end of the next day day. (Was he also culturing strep > bacteria off the keyboard?) He determined what we'd already determined: > needs a new hard drive. He ordered it and said it would be in Tuesday > (two days ago). I wasn't allowed to take the computer back home > meanwhile (where I was happily running it from an external hard drive) > as he said that would require him to close the ticket -- Apple policy. > Fine. Hard drive didn't show up Tuesday as promised. He said it would > be Friday. "With the holidays and all." Huh? If I'd ordered a new > computer from the Apple Store, it damn well would have arrived, along > with the credit card bill. I mean, if there's one thing that's > dependable these days it's the entrepreneurial courier companies. So > the hard drive will be in tomorrow. Will the computer be fixed > tomorrow? No. Nobody's coming in the store tomorrow, and only two hours > on Saturday. Apparently my computer, with its guts exposed on some > bench, doesn't merit attention from the tech until Monday. Will it be > ready Monday? No. He said it will be Tuesday. Who the hell knows why. I > bought the three-year Apple Care policy, but I never bothered to look > whether labor is paid for. If it's not, and I'm out $100 or $200 for > his painstaking determination of the problem I had already identified > -- and for his indifference to the notion of timely service -- I'm > going to refuse to pay it. I could have bought a third-party hard drive > and put the beast in myself rather than deal with these twits. They're > the kind of passive-aggressive tech-heads we're all familiar with -- in > fact, some of you are just like them -- and I'm going to make sure > Steve Jobs is aware of them. So he can roll up his sleeves -- wait, he > always has his mock-turtleneck sleeves pushed up, 1980s style -- and > troubleshoot the problem. Happy Thanksgiving. Geez! For a busted hard drive on a laptop, you should have just bought the largest 2.5" IDE drive your budget will allow and install it yourself. For $200, you can buy a pretty decent size hard drive. Installing a hard drive takes all of five minutes, and the directions are easy to find via a Google search. That's what I did a couple of years ago when the hard drive on my PowerBook died on me. |