To the Apple Store Again: No Genius

1/2 an hour to get there, 5 minutes waiting for my appointment time, 15 minutes waiting for my appointment, 1/2 an hour getting home.

I was in a reasonable mood when I drove through rainy Portland morning rush hour traffic to get to the Apple Store in Pioneer Square by 8AM. I was buoyed with the thought that I might finally be at the end of my Apple hell. They’d supposedly done a clean install of OS X and restored just my user files.

I sat outside the store until just before 8 and then went in. I arrived with my laptop and router, as requested. After waiting 7 minutes and seeing multiple customers come in and sit down with Apple employees, I spoke up.

I was curious, not surly.

I was told it would be a couple of minutes. I opened up my 9 month old Apple MacBook Pro 17″ only to find it in the state that my desktop has been at many times: unable to shut down. On my OS X desktop I had a dock, but no menu. Selecting restart from a light press of the power button didn’t change anything. Rather than get angry, I was grateful that I was at the store, just about to speak with a Mac Genius. Or so I thought. At 15 minutes, someone came up to me and said that Devlin was running late and going be there soon.

I told the guy that I was angry, asked him to call me when my computer was ready, and stormed out of the store.

At 9:45, I called Apple and spoke with Ingrid Olson, the manager. She told me that they didn’t call me because my computer wasn’t ready. She did not have an answer for me as to how long a customer should wait: that Apple has not set amount of time that it expects its customers to wait for appointments. She told me that, in my words, all they could do is waste more of my time.

Devlin had a flat, but they didn’t tell me that when I was there. They didn’t offer to let someone else help me because they wanted to give me the best.

So now, I get to bring my laptop and router in to the Apple store again at 7:30AM on Saturday morning. Joy. I’m holding no false belief that this is the end of things.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under apple store, As bad as a PC, iMac Late 2008, MBPro 2.5GHz. You can feed this entry. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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