Down Time...

Good news and bad news: The good news is that I've had an OpEd accepted by the NYT--look for it in the next week or so.
The bad news? Catastrophic computer failure. I came home on thursday, and tried to wake up my powerbook. No dice. I had the gray screen of death.



So I did what good Mac lovers will--I restarted, zapped the pram, fiddled and futzed. Nada. Ok, so I fired up the very old G3 I-Book still running on OS 10.1.5 and barely able to keep up with blogging, writing or much of anything, ported over my e-mail, and headed down to Tekserve. Now despite the questionable reputation, I've had some good experienced with them--I've purchased several computers from them over the years. But yesterday I got this--no other way to describe him--total ass. With a look of disdain worthy of a effeminate concierge he began to catalogue the problems with my powerbook...wear in the casing (I wrote a whole book on the thing for Christ's sakes) a dent here and there... including the one by the DC adaptor which has been there for nearly 2 years and which TekServe itself described as "cosmetic" over a year and a half ago... I have to say, this guy was worse than officious. He was downright scowling and awful--the opposite of what I expect at a Mac place.

So then, to make matters worse, even though he couldn't diagnose my problem, he told me apple care wouldn't cover it and tried to scam me into paying over 400 bucks for repairs he couldn't detail. I was furious. It'd taken nearly 2 hours for this crap.

So Goodbye tekserve. They just lost a longtime customer.

Later today I have an appointment at the Apple Genus bar. I'm hoping they're more decent.

It's strange, I've owned a 512, an SE, a powerbook 100, a 520c a G3 I-book, and two 15 inch TI powerbooks over the years, and now, just as Apple is at it's acme, I'm actually considering abandoning them just on the basis of this bad service.

So pray for that I get a good Genius this afternoon who will restore my faith in the company. I love the Macs, and have both used and pushed them for years. But boy is it easy to piss away a lot of goodwill with one truly awful encounter.