Dan Mayer's Blog

Apple is known for pretty good costumer service (source), so when I was having a minor issue with my mactop (Macbook laptop), I thought I would bring it in for repairs. I will share my really crappy experience with Apple customer service that followed.

I had about 45 days left on my warrant. I had purchase one of the small 13 inch refurbished laptops from Apple. Apple refurbished laptops come with a 1 year warranty. My laptop had been pretty awesome, it had one slightly annoying problem that was happening more and more often. The backlight would flicker a bunch and sometime flicker entirely off for a moment or two. I figured it was just a matter of time before it flicker off and never returned. I decided that it was worth having the service before my warranty ran out. I brought it in, and apple said it would take 3 to 5 days and they would ship it back to me, but I was about to leave on vacation so I decided to bring it in when I returned.

I attempted to drop by the apple store so they could mail it in for repairs. I was told I would have to get an appointment to drop my laptop off. They checked online and they were out of appointments for the rest of the day. I brought it back the next day. My laptop was then shipped off right before Memorial Day weekend, after which I started a new job on Tuesday and figured I wouldn’t have my laptop in time. Tuesday morning, amazingly my laptop was at the door. I excitedly rip it open plug it in and power it on. It comes up for about 30 seconds before making this scary image, and it refuses to ever boot again. Apple had just shipped me back a broken laptop, it was a new case, it had my hard drive, but it didn’t work. It wouldn’t even make a boot sound.

I ship the mactop back to apple for a second attempt at it being fixed. Friday afternoon I get a call while at the office, I am told my laptop is in Boulder, but it had an incomplete address. So it returned to the Boulder Fedex service center and they would try again Monday, or I could pick it up. So I leave work early Friday after spending my first week at a new job with out a laptop, to pick it up about 15 minutes away or so. Now that I have the package I check the incomplete address. Apple mailed my computer to:

Dan Mayer
Apt #23
Boulder, CO 80304

There was no street address, and everything previous with apple had my full and correct address. I checked online and apple has my full and correct address in my online account as well. Through out all of this I had probably spent an hour and a half on the phone with apple between the various repairs / disrepairs. So I open the box, plug it in, power it up… and it works thank god it works! It now makes a weird humming sound when the screen is open at random… My laptop mouse key now sticks and doesn’t respond well to double clicking. So after all the ordeal my laptop is back and basically in worse shape then when I originally sent it in. I will say that the screen doesn’t flicker anymore, which is good, but the mouse key is driving me nuts, and I don’t really trust sending it in to Apple again.

I thought this was interesting. It is funny how you see the laws align around really weird and unlikely deaths that happen to really upset the public... Fireworks for example...

Number of US men who will die in 2008

I don't have a lot of free time to be writing currently. So the things I am writing tend not to be for this blog. If you want to read about what I am up to, check out our new company blog, The Devver Blog. We are also running on WordPress for the first time instead of MovableType, which is kind of cool. It just gives me a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each. Yeah it is a little less of my personal life, but I do actually reread what I write there. So you will see far fewer typos, grammatical errors, etc...

So far things are going well with the new company and project.

I have been trying to get better at a habbit of archive old conversations that are no longer needed, and starting emails that need to be dealt with in a day or two. I did this awhile ago and cleared my emails down to just the newest and most important, but I started slacking and it quickly grew to a mess of over 1500 emails. I am now down to less than 100, some of which are recent / active email threads, and some are starred emails I have to deal with. Either way I am hoping to slowly go through these last few starred emails and then I will finally be set up right to be on top of my email situation. Rock on, so hopefully that means I will less often ignore and fail to respond to people who write me emails, so if you feel like I missed over you last letter or never got back to you or anything like that, shoot me an email now, cause I should be all over it.

Today was bike to work day. We walk to work almost everyday, but to show our support we biked over to a meeting, and then to our office later. Luckily it wasn't bike to work and home day. After working in the office all day we forgot that we biked to work, and we walked home, hence leaving our forgotten about bikes at the office. Awesome!

Oh well good times, I just fixed one of the four major problems that came to my attention today, arggg... I am thinking we better rock it this weekend.