Unexpected Trip to Greenhills Mall

There is some sort of unwritten law around our house about the number or working computers that can co-exist at any given time. You never know the number or when you've crossed it exactly. Last night while i watch some basketball in HD, i took the opportunity to restore our mac mini to working order. You may remember from blogs past that it was in the girls play room, and locked down to where it could only do two things. Play movies, and goto pbskids or seseame street's website. You may also recall that in January sparta electrics finest succeeded in killing lots of electronics in our house. The mac mini was one of those casualties and just got put back into service last night. When i went to bed last night she was finishing up her downloads from apple and was ready to be beaten on by our two girls.

Well this morning i took the opportunity to sleep in alittle bit. When i awoke sam said the words i never like to hear, "I think something is wrong with the mac" I said the playroom mac? She said no the big mac. The bigmac that contains 20,000 family pictures, tons of recipes, videos, emails yada yada. Luckily we have a good backup in place so all of those are safe. None the less i didn't like hearing the words. After breakfast i sat down and took a look at her. I'm no computer doctor, but i knew that it was the same thing as last time. She was shutting down randomly loosing power. In this moment i lost sight of the happy clouds and roses that usually surround my mac life. I was pretty ticked to be honest. I had just paid $175 bucks to have it fixed in january and here we are back in the same spot. I took about 10 minutes to cool off before i spoke with apple on the phone. I got a rep pretty quickly and told him my story. He asked for my zip code and told me there was an opening today at the genius bas at greenhills. I knew thats what it would take to fix it so i accepted the opening. These spots are pretty hard to get so i was happy to get it. To make it on time i would have to leave in about 20 minutes however. So i threw on some clothes and packed up the mac and scooted down I-40. To be honest my thoughts were, get this boat anchor running and we'll sell it and get a new mac that has warranty. I have loved this comptuer, don't get me wrong. It has made 100's of dvds, worked countless hours in photoshop and final cut. She's had a hard life. It still runs as good as the day we bought it, but this had me pretty worked up. I made it to the mall, was greeted by a nice Apple employee at the door who checked me in. The store was buzzing today. It was like New Years Eve 1999 or something. People were every where. They walked me back to the Genius Bar where i met Ellis.

Ellis was a young energetic guy. Really nice and took me ahead of two other people because they weren't there yet. As we exchanged information, i told him the story of our iMac and its recent woes. I said very little, and showed no anger just answered his questions. Awaiting the worst news of "i think its the logic board" I knew this was their next step in the decision tree. But for my out of warranty mac this is about a $700 buck decision. It was at this point Ellis began to calm my fears and take me even deeper into the Mac fan boy clan. He did his early tests, and gave me the "let me look up a couple things". I know this stall tactic well because i use it every week in my tech support methods. He looked up at me once and said "did you pay for the power supply in Knoxville" to which i answered yes. It was at this point he blew my mind. Ellis said, "don't take this the wrong way" i was thinking oh no here it comes. But he said we trained the knoxville store, but they don't always do things the way we would here. And he began to tell me how with this line of computer this symptom was typically handled by replacing both logic board and power supply at the same time. He then told me, at the end of the day when i clock out, I am a mac user just like you. He said i don't want you to have any bad feelings toward us for whats gone on with this. So here is what i'm going to do. He said i'm going to order you a new power supply, and a new logic board and get them installed all at our expense. He said is this ok with you? I said could you repeat that? He said I know you've driven a long way, and had some problems from this and I want to make it right. I was shocked and amazed. I've done the searches on these boards tonight. The cheapest i can get them on the net is over 500 bucks. And those things are pretty hard to install in these all in one units. Needless to say Apple regained above and beyond any trust i had lost in them. Ellis could have easily stuck it to me, but chose not to. I have emailed his manager and told him what a great job he did. I hope it helps him in some way. Apple is not perfect, and I don't always agree with them on every matter, but if they keep folks like Ellis around then they will continue to thrive!! The iMac should be basically brand new later this week, and I will continue to be buying Apple products until they give me a reason not to do so.

** Some of you maybe thinking. Don't you fix and repair other peoples computers every day for a living? The answer is yes. Then why don't you do this yourself you ask? Well outside of this incident where it got surged with electricity I have had zero problems. No lock ups, no spyware, nothing. It just works. The true answer of why i don't repair this machine is because of its nature. The black box dells we have at work are very easy to open and have very standard parts. The all in one iMac is very similiar to working on a laptop. It is very tightly put together, and has to be taken apart in a very specific way to keep from damaging it. We do very little laptop repair at UT either, we diagnose troubles and get Dell to do it very much like I have with this computer. the mac mini is more like the desktop and has parts that are easier to remove so i fixed it at home. Hope this clarifies any confusion you may have had... because i could see it on your face ha ha. Happy Easter everyone!!