My MacBook Pro Repair Saga
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Customer Service
So, this last week for me has been absolute murder. On Monday, I started up my MacBook Pro (last generation 15″ model) to find that nothing was appearing on the screen, which was a bit of a problem honestly (I know, I’m a real perfectionist). So, I tried mounting the drive via FireWire on my parents’ iMac G4 and it worked, which was really good news, cause it meant the hard drive still worked. So, I made a fresh back-up of all of my stuff and ran to the Maine Mall Apple Store to see the miracle workers at the Genius Bar.
Well, they preformed a miracle, they got it to work, and it only took them 30 seconds to do. But some miracles are short lived. Two hours later, the screen gave out again. I tried the trick that the Genius had showed me, where you hold down the power button, the command and control keys until you here a very loud beep and the machine should start up normally. Well, it didn’t work, and I had a video that I needed to edit. So, it was back to the Apple Store for another visit with the Geniuses. This time, there were no miracles. My beloved MacBook Pro had to be sent to the depot to have it’s logic board replaced.
So, I spent the next four days knowing that I had a video to edit for school, a Photoshop project due soon, and a number of final papers to write. Not to mention the complete disconnect of not having access to the web in a proper browser. Sorry, the BlackBerry is great for email, and I could still Twitter, but everything else was out of the question. Well, on Friday, I got a call from the Apple Store to let me know that my MacBook had returned and was ready to be picked up. So I drove at what many would call an excessive speed to the Maine Mall to grab it and get my daily fix back. Well, it wasn’t really what I was hoping for.
They brought it out of the back room still wrapped in the bubble wrap from it’s shipping. They took it out and handed it to me, I opened it up and found a large scratch between the keyboard and trackpad. I asked the associate who got it out of the back room about it and he talked to the store manager and they said that if they had the part (they called it the “top case”), they could replace it, but I would have to wait another day. Great.
Well, I got it back Saturday afternoon sooner than they told me it would take. Needless to say, I spent all of Saturday night/Sunday morning catching up on my finals work. I’m exhausted and still behind on everything. But, at least it didn’t cost anything to fix my laptop. Here’s a question though, my MacBook came back with a scratch, and they repaired it for free, but it took another day of work way from me. Good customer service or bad?
GoDaddy’s Great Customer Service
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Customer Service
Let’s face it, when you think about the telephone, cellular, cable, and airline companies, you don’t usually think about great customer service. Here’s a story from today about great customer service.
Yes, this post is not negative, it’s not satirical, or anything that I write a lot. But, I should tell the story for anyone out there who’s looking for a hosting company. I use GoDaddy as my domain registrar and hosting service for this blog and currently another I will mention soon. I was having problems uploading a file to the server through both the WordPress media uploader, and through the FTP client GoDaddy provides. I twittered my frustration:
Can someone please explain to me why, no matter what I do, I can’t host a file bigger than 8 MB on my GoDaddy hosting?
Well, shortly there after, GoDaddyGuy @ replied me asking if I wanted someone to call me to help out with the problem. I responded with a yes and not ten minutes later a GoDaddy support person named Alon called my house and we both worked on a solution together for about half an hour. Alon knew his stuff and explained to me that the upload limit was set by a PHP script in WordPress and he showed me how to work around it.
Thanks to Alon and GoDaddy, I got the problem solved and I remain a very happy customer. Anyone who is looking for hosting or domains should use GoDaddy, no question about it.