Quarter Life Crisis

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Charger replaced

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As few days ago I phoned Apple to get my iBook’s charger replaced. And it was a frustrating experience. I don’t expect much from such telephone services. I assume the people there to be underpaid ill-informed script-driven droids who are either incapable or discouraged from thinking. Having heard from people who work in such jobs and learned that the majority of calls come from people who weren’t capable to plug the machine and then gave them a call, it’s probably a fact that their opinion of me, the caller, is in the same low region. And it’s hard to blame the people working there for that. Staying strictly with the script might be the only way to do their job without ending up insane or fired.

On the other hand, I don’t call such help lines for the sheer fun of it and expect proper service by informed people which I won’t get. And that’s what happened when I called Apple on Friday. The guy I had on the phone wasn’t particularly interested in helping me and made my life difficult by all sorts of formalisms to rule out that it was actually my charger that was broken and not the computer. Unfortunately it wasn’t him but me who had to suggest to just try the charger with a friend’s computer to make sure the charger was the problem. He agreed that was a good idea – at least – and I said I’d call back.

While it may be a valid question whether the computer itself is to blame for this, I just have to remark that I’ve never seen any machine with that kind of problem. And that Apple’s engineers should be thoroughly ashamed if such problems can (a) happen in *Books and (b) aren’t handled by software.

So the weekend came and I just swapped chargers with a friend. A simple thing to do. And – unsurprisingly – my charger showed the same problem with his computer and his charger worked just fine with mine. Calling Apple again, I was prepared for the worst. And at first that seemed to be a good idea as the guy I spoke to told me that my request had been marked as ‘denied’ – leaving me both astonished and annoyed. Thanks Mr support guy! Exactly what we had agreed on… I’m sure Dave‘d offer some appropriate expletives here.

Luckily the new guy was more willing to do his job, understood the problem and the testing we made and arranged the exchange within a few minutes. Sure, that wasn’t perfect… leaving your credit card details (so they can charge you if you don’t return the broken part) keeps feeling a bit strange but makes sense and oddly their system seems to require them to put you on hold while they finish off the replacement order on the computer – which makes me feel uneasy. What are they hiding? Will my call be dumped after all? Why do I have to listen to f*cking christmas muzak?

But everything worked just fine and I was told the new charger will be there by the end of the week. Surprisingly, it already arrived this morning – less than 24 hours after my call. Much better! Fingers crossed that the new charger will work better.

November 30, 2005, 19:34

Tagged as apple, apple defect, broken.

Comments

Comment by Sebastian: User icon

Good luck with the new thing. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth to undergo an ordeal like telephone support.

Too bad there’s no alternative to Apple products.

November 30, 2005, 21:45

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