In the past, I’ve always just waited until Monday morning when I could stop by Tekserve on the way to work, but this weekend I decided to give the so-called “Genius Bar” a shot and I toted my PowerBook over there looking for some resolution to a problem with personal file sharing. On Saturday morning, the wait was longer than I had expected, though still reasonable at about ten minutes, and I had a peppy technician poking around the laptop’s settings before I knew it.
As with most technical support I encounter, there was the customary preliminary questioning to establish that my problem wasn’t something completely obvious and that I had at least a bit more know-how than a typical retail customer, but it wasn’t nearly as patronizing as even the support I get from Apple’s phone support personnel. Before too long, they had identified the problem as a permissions issue and resolved it easily enough, which was terrific even if I got the sense that the technician was almost as surprised as I was that his solution worked. In any event, I was generally pleased; I was in and out of there inside of thirty minutes with my problem solved and having been charged absolutely nothing.
+