James Burgess

I was skeptical, but desperate. Kate’s Powerbook G4 has been in the shop for over 6 weeks now, and she has some vital patient medical records and documents on there. We were promised a 3 week wait at the absolute most, and that’s just not happened. Add to this that the Apple repair centre in the UK has apparently had to “order in” each part ‘needed’ for the repair, and you begin to see how absurd this is becoming.

As the beginning of the fourth week of waiting dawned, we went into our local reseller (from where we’d send the machine off to be repaired) only to be told that the logic board had DOA’d… This immediately sent my mind racing back to the previous three supposed-DOA logic boards, the last time the machine went in for repair (only about 8 months previous). The faint smell of lies wafted through the air towards my nostrils.

Two weeks later, and 2 more “DOA’d” logic boards later (”We’ll order another one, it’ll take 2 weeks.”), I decided to do something about it… So, whilst the Apple support pages have no email contact (I’m a student, I can’t afford premium-rate numbers), I was sure I’d seen an article on Giz, or similar, about people who’d contacted Steve Jobs’ email directly (I use this personal connection somewhat lightly), and got a response.

I set off to Google, and found a few of ‘his’ email addresses after a few minutes, and then wrote a mammoth essay about the issues this time, last time, and especially the lies - not to mention the lack of all of that medical information, crucial to Kate’s qualification. A few days elapsed, and nothing seemed to happen…

Then, today, I was contacted by someone at the head of Apple’s affairs in Europe, giving me a personal number for his office, and a promise to resolve the issue if I phoned him (or, if I preferred, he phoned me) at my earliest convenience.

I’ll be on the phone to Apple tomorrow, and hopefully sorting this mess out (I’ll keep you updated), but it just shows that sometimes you actually have to go right to the top, just to get a simple issue sorted out. I’d advise anyone also experiencing issues of this sort of nature to email: steve@mac.com, sjobs@apple.com or steve@apple.com. You may get somewhere!

Will keep you updated!