Snarkastic

I guess this is goodbye, old friend

My PowerBook G4 has run my life for almost three years, which is a lot for a laptop and a hell of a lifespan for someone like me who can't pass within three yards of a crack on the sidewalk without faceplanting. But the road of late has not been an easy one.

July 2007: Right around the time this was getting ready to happen, I started having problems with the display. Weird colors here and there. I make my living with FCP, so this was problematic. I tried this and I tried that and I carried it around to all the smarter nerds in the building, and right as we figured out what was going on, you will recall, the whole thing up and died. So I packed it off to AppleCare with added instructions to take a look at the cable connecting the screen to the rest of the laptop.

My baby came back to me with a new (empty) (sob!) hard drive...and a brand new screen. That still flickered. Which made sense, having deduced that the problem was in the connections somewhere. It also came back with six symmetrical gouges in the top case, like it had smarted off to Wolverine. Improperly loaded onto a conveyor belt? Who knows. The damage was cosmetic, but obvious, and the little pointy bits of metal flaking off didn't help. I was right on the brink of a four-month crunch at work, so I let it slide.

October 2007: Over the next few months the flickering worsened. The whole screen would turn purple, or pink, or green. I could "fix" it by adjusting the screen this way or that, but at the slightest provocation it would kick up again. When half the screen started flashing black and white, I had another conversation with AppleCare about the unsuccessful previous attempt and the damage they'd done the last time, and off it went again.

I should make this point before I go any further: I'm not a glassy-eyed Apple acolyte, but the AppleCare program is absolutely nonpareil. If you're rocking any of their fine machines, get it. Get it get it get it. Computers break. They're full of tiny parts, and they break. I didn't have a single hiccup with my PowerBook for the first two years, but since then my investment of a couple hundred bucks has more than paid for itself. It's simple and easy: You go online and request repair service. They overnight you a shipping box, overnight your computer back to them, fix it, and overnight it back to you--no charge. All my repair work has been done in Texas. I'm in Southern California. My time without my laptop has ranged from 48 hours to 4 days, and their support folks are friendly and knowledgeable.

All that said--someone's dropping the ball at this repair depot in Houston. In both of my conversations with call center techs, I explained the problem fully, where I thought the faulty components were, they concurred, and both times it came back screwy. In October, they replaced the damaged case, replaced the (totally functional and perfectly working, which I told them, twice) screen...and in the process, dropped something on the top case that left a dent about the size of a dime.

This time, though, the display problem appeared to have been fixed, or at least addressed, so I slapped a sparkly goldfish sticker over the blemish and soldiered on.

March 2008: Here we go again. Black, white, pink, purple, green. This time when I called AppleCare I asked if there was another center I could ship it to. I had a hard time getting the guy to understand that I didn't mean an Apple Store, and gave up. Record turnaround on this one--shipped out Monday morning, back on Wednesday afternoon. They replaced the damaged top case...and replaced the screen. Again. It was clear to me that nothing had been done to remove the hinge and poke around inside. And if you've talked to me at all the last week or so, you know they also fucked up my keyboard. The d, n, and o keys repeat anywhere from two to five times any time my finger so much as grazes them. And I had just about had it.

Monday: Long dark tea-time of the soul. I was out for someone's skin. Typing the simplest of communications took forever. I was all set to spit and hiss at anyone I could get ahold of in Cupertino....and then I left the house.

I have an exasperating commute, especially in the morning. It's an hour of idling twelve miles on the 10, on a good day. And as I sat in park, reading my email, I decided to call Help Desk instead. I'd never had to call Apple tech support before (the advantage of bedding a succession of Mac geeks), and I didn't precisely need tech support now, but their prowess is legendary...and frankly, I was bored. This was a whim. It was about to be a whim with a bigass dividend.

I was promptly greeted by Kevin, who sat through the whole story with admirable patience. I was calm; I was friendly; I let him know right off the bat that I work with these critters for a living and knew what I was talking about without being a jackhole about it. Kevin, in return, was a paragon of techie awesomedom. He didn't talk down to me. He asked smart questions, had actually heard of the issue I was having, and agreed with the diagnosis we'd arrived at months earlier. He didn't waste time with scripted apologies, just got right down to OK, Let's Fix This mode.

Now, the reason I was calling in the first place was to find someone who'd direct me to another repair center, any repair center. But before I could even get around to that, Kevin asked me how long, at this point, I could reasonably go without a laptop. I told him about a week, given my workload, thinking he was planning to ship it off to Taiwan or something.

And that's when I remembered Apple's apocryphal policy regarding machines with three or more major component failures, right as Kevin told me that given the short timespan and number of unsuccessful repairs, he was authorized to replace my laptop. I have one of the last iterations of PowerBooks before they were discontinued...could he interest me in a MacBook Pro of comparable specs?

COULD HE.

We hammered out the details, talked backups and restoring from Time Machine to different chipsets, got all the particulars squared away, and Kevin handed me off to Natasha in Corporate Customer Relations to coordinate the exchange. Before he did, he gave me his email address, told me if I didn't have all the information I needed by the next day to let him know, and to keep him posted as I made the transition from PPC to Intel. Natasha called me within the hour with a FedEx tracking number. Tomorrow, I'm going to put my constant companion in the box one last time and send it home to the mothership. As soon as the tracking number enters the system, Apple will release my new machine, which will arrive in 1-3 days.

So this is all by way of saying goodbye to my darling PowerBook, that has kept my entire life in check for almost three years. I just know they'll take good care of you back at the mothership. And that once again, I'll have scarce access to that email address in my sidebar for a little bit, that posting will be irregular(er), and to exhort you all again to throw down for the AppleCare plan (access to Help Desk personnel alone is more than worth it), but it's also to say thanks to the Mac Borg. Because of Kevin and Natasha, Apple has made a loyal customer into a damn evangelist.

Posted by Nastinchka at April 3, 2008 11:14 AM