repruhsent's Journal: Apple Customer Service

About a month ago I bought a 17" 2.0 GHz iMac G5 from the Apple Store down in Troy, a swanky suburb of Detroit. It's a pretty spiffy machine for dev work, with the exception that for some reason the fuckheads working on the SDL project don't see fit to provide dev packages for anything other than Windows and Linux. They had this neato deal going on where I got me a nice iPod and a printer along with the system and saved quite a bit of dough. I was very pleased.

Notice the operative word - "was." Things were going fine until I decided to clean install OS X on my PowerBook over the weekend. I was too damn lazy to copy shit from the iMac over my LAN so I booted it up in FireWire Disk Target mode and let the Tiger setup application bring my profile over. I then proceeded to go to the XP box and watch some porn while the copy executed (it takes a while to copy my home folder since it has like 4000+ mp3s inside it).

I came up about an hour later with a sore wrist (LOL) and noticed that the iMac had frozen. WTF. I rebooted it and all I was able to get was a series of clicking noises coming from the upper left corner of the machine (that's where the hard disk is). I left it alone over night and tried it again in the morning, checking the machine with the Apple Hardware Test disc. It passed with flying colors.

Amazingly, the system booted up fine the rest of that day and Monday. On Tuesday, however, it gave up the ghost; it wouldn't boot at all. I spent over an hour on the phone with AppleCare trying to get the issue resolved; mostly, so they'd shut up about it being a software problem and agree that it needed warranty service.

They finally shut up about it being a software problem. One douchebag even suggested that I should perform a permission check on the drive (basically running a big chmod shell script to see if the permissions on the drive are okay). I'm sure that file system permissions have a LOT to do with mechanical clicking sounds coming from the hard drive. Anyway, they suggested I try reinstalling Mac OS X on it and then taking it to the Apple Store for service. I took it back up there today.

So, I arrived at the "Genius Bar" around 11:45a today. The "Genius Bar" is a place for dumb fuckers to bring their Mac in and have some fat smelly douche computer tech them to death. I had to wait until like 1:00p to get service. The rest of the time, they were helping this cute asian girl who was too dumb to realize that the external USB hard drive she was hooking up to her iBook was bad. When I finally sat down, it took a couple of minutes for them to recognize I was there for my "appointment" when there were a bunch of prostatots clogging up the counter. Anyway, I waited at least 100 years to be told that he agreed and I had a bad hard disk. The lazy fuckers wouldn't even give me a new machine; they have to send out for the part, install it and then give it back. It'll take until Wednesday or Thursday.

Now, I'm not going to have a tantrum like this guy and break the damn thing, but seriously, WTF. Because of that fucking machine, I haven't even been able to properly annoy our bestest buddy in the whole wide world this week. Now, I have a whole week of bothering to catch up on. Gay.