Why I hate Apple (part III)

Part Three: Your Multi-Billion Dollar Global Corporation is Only As Good As Your Worst Employee


This is a story about customer service. This is a story about how to lose one customer with one bad employee. 


Six months after I bought my iPod Touch, it went wrong. By this point, I had more or less filled up its 32 gig hard drive with all the music I owned. For several weeks after purchasing it, I spent my evenings in the study (I call it a "study", but it's more of a junk room with a computer) sat amidst several towering stacks of CDs, taking each CD in turn and copying it into iTunes, before synching it to the iPod.


I learned several things doing this:

• It's depressing how few CDs are to be found in their proper case
• There is no formula yet discovered to determine, when a CD case is empty, where the disk is most likely to be found. For example, Discography:Greatest Hits of the Pet Shop Boys was now living in Script for a Jester's Tear by Marillion, which in turn had usurped Moby
• It's depressing how much truly shit music I own

I also developed a kind of fearful awe of the "synchronization" process - connecting up the iPod to the PC with the special cable, so that the iTunes library magically aligns itself with that of its desktop parent. The iPod screen went blank except for a single animated icon, some time passed, and then it would suddenly reload itself back to normal... but with extra music. Every time I did this, and I did it a lot, I couldn't help but watch anxiously while the icon span round as it transferred the music. I felt like an early pagan who watched every Winter turn to Spring from the mouth of his cave, terrified that if just one year his fertility dance was slightly displeasing to the Gods, then it would remain Winter forever. It was transcendental voodoo magic, and I respected it. It was my own form of cargo cult.


So, eventually, I had an iPod stuffed full of music. And then it went wrong. What happened was this:


I was at work, and I wanted to load a new CD that had arrived that morning from Amazon onto my iPod. I had a second iTunes music library on my work computer specifically for this reason, and had successfully copied over a number of CDs this way previously. So, I knew what I was doing. But on this particular morning, I'd forgotten to bring my cable, the special proprietary Apple cable that makes the magic happen. 


No worries. I happened to know that a considerable number of my colleagues would own a cable I could borrow, as the entire company had been given Apple vouchers several months before; Apple products were everywhere in my company. We were awash with them, like a tiny Pacific island clogged with rubber ducks after a Chinese cargo ship capsizes offshore.


I quickly located a cable, ripped the CD to iTunes, and connected up my iPod.


Uh oh. My worst nightmare. Eternal winter descended. Almost instantly, some kind of error message appeared and MY MUSIC WAS ALL GONE. I knew, the moment the familiar spinning synch icon didn't appear that something was horribly wrong. I looked at the memory bar on my iPod. It was showing that no memory was in use. I'd gone from over 30 gigs of music to 0 gigs of anything in less than a second.


I was distressed. To be honest, I was slightly traumatised. My half-joking awe of the mystical synchronization process was now full blown anger at a cruel and vengeful god. But I'm a resourceful guy. I reckoned I could probably find a fix. I spent the rest of the day on Google seeking assistance.... but for once, not even Google could come to my aid.


Something was fishy. I may not be the most technically knowledgeable software development employee in the world, but I knew that it took more than a half-second to delete 30 gigs of files. So, I was suspicious that the music was still in there somewhere; it was just hidden from me. It was maddeningly out of my grasp, a modern day Tantalus's tree of juicy musical fruit, never to be picked again.


I may sound flippant about this (some would say flippancy is my only style of communication) but I was genuinely upset. So, I did what anyone would do. I took it back to the place where I bought it from, for help. I took a special trip into town to pay the Apple store a visit, the treacherous music-less music player shoved in my pocket.


In the Apple store


I had a bad feeling about how things were going to turn out in the Apple store when, after briefly explaining my predicament to one of their staff, I was told "you'll need to arrange an appointment with one of the guys at the genius bar and come back."


Whaaat? Book an appointment? With a genius? In a shop that sells a handful of computers and music players? I don't want root canal or a heart bypass operation. Also, why are you hiring people to work in your shop who don't know enough to help the customers? Can't you just do something radical like you know train them about your products or something?


I explained to the guy that I didn't have the time to come back. I was still annoyed about my AWOL music. So, I concede that part of what follows was my own fault for being stubborn and refusing the offer of wiser "genius" counsel at a later date. I was also trying to make a point that if I enter the shop that sold me a device and ask for help with said device, at the very least I expect some attempt to assist me from ANY of their assistants. 


What followed was a conversation that went along these lines (this is not word for word what either of us said, but this how I remember the tone of the exchange in my mind) :


All the music has been wiped from my iPod
- Oh (immediately not interested. I wasn't here to buy anything)
I just plugged in the cable to synch the music to my computer and it all disappeared instantly. I'd spent ages putting all my music on there. I think it might be a fault of some kind.
- OK
It happened so quickly that I think the music is still actually on the hard disk somewhere. I had a look on Google and some people said they could recover their music when that happened. Is there a way to recover my music?
- Let's have a look.
(I hand over iPod. He takes it, checks its status very briefly, confirms that there is indeed no music on there then hands it back)
- You'll need to resynch it to your iTunes library at home
Oh. OK. But I've got two libraries. And I don't think that'll work because I don't think there is any memory free.
- Wait... You've got another iTunes library? Well, that's what's happened then.
What do you mean?
- You can't have more than one library. So it will have deleted your music.
What? You can have multiple libraries. You can set one to manually synch.
- No. No you can't. If you try to synchronize to another library it will remove your music. That's what it's supposed to do.
I've been using two libraries for months, and I've never had a problem before.
- It doesn't support more than one iTunes library. That's why you've lost your music.
Yes it does. I've been using two libraries for months. So how I have been using two libraries then?
- It will remove your music if you try and synchronize to another library. (by now he seems to be getting impatient with me)
It doesn't. And it hasn't. Anyway, I don't think what happened has got anything at all to do with synching to two libraries.
- You can't synch to more than one library
Yes. You. Can.
- No you can't.


By now, I was getting really annoyed. Not only did this guy have no fucking clue how his own product worked, he also seemed much more determined to argue with me in a bored-with-a-slight-edge-of-hostile manner than deign to offer any help or advice whatsoever, or show the least bit of concern. What pissed me off the most was that he made it perfectly plain that he simply didn't care, and that by talking to him I was wasting his time. I was an idiot, who didn't know how the iPod worked, and as a consequence had wiped all my music - and he didn't give a shit.


Is there any way for you to check the hard drive, to see if the music is still there somewhere?
- No
Can't you hook it up to a diagnostic computer or something?
- No
So, is there anything I can do to inspect the hard drive? Any software you can give me?
- You need to take it to a hard drive repair specialist
Oh, right. Do you have one here I can talk to?
- We don't do that. You'd need to take it to a third-party.
Sigh. OK. Where?
- I suggest you use the Yellow Pages to look up hard drive repair companies and use one of them.


At this point I left. I couldn't quite believe what had just happened. I had taken a £300 gadget back to the store where I'd bought it, because it had developed a serious fault - and I was being told to go away, look up a company on the Yellow Pages and take it to them instead. The way I'd been treated equated in my mind to a raspberry being blown in my face and the Apple store sticking two fingers up at me. They may as well have taken my iPod and jumped up and down on it while laughing for all the interest they showed in my situation.


I suspect that I'd been talking to a salesman, possibly one in a bad mood, and I'd upset him by declining the offer of an appointment with a genius, choosing instead to badger him.  I didn't think my complaint was a trivial one, but he demonstrated zero empathy and treated me as an irritant.


I was so disgusted at the indifferent, supercilious manner in which I'd been treated that I submitted a complaint on the Apple web site describing my experiences in detail.


I never got a response.


I eventually found out what had happened to my iPod. When I'd borrowed a cable from my colleague at work, the cable I'd taken was quite an old one and not compatible with the iPod Touch. When I connected up the iPod to the PC, it basically barfed. I did also find some software that could recover the music files from the iPod. Yes, surprise surprise, the files were still all in memory, despite the iPod claiming no knowledge of them. 


So, what had happened was in essence very simple. I'd used a duff cable and the iPod had thrown a hissy fit. In my idealised world of good customer service, what would have happened in the Apple store is this:


All the music has been wiped from my iPod
- Oh dear. I'm really sorry about that, sir. I realise you must be pretty upset. Let's see if we can get to the bottom of this. Have you by any chance used a different connector cable or borrowed a cable from someone recently to use when synchronizing?
Yes, actually I have. Someone lent me their cable yesterday to use.
- Ahh. This is a known issue with this device I'm afraid, Sir. It doesn't support some older cables, and can crash as a result, removing access to all your music. There is some software out there than can recover your music. I'll print you out a list. Try downloading one of those and following the instructions. You should restore most of your files. Come back if you have any problems.
Thank you.


If that, or something like that, had happened, I wouldn't be writing this blog. And that would have saved us all a lot of time. I don't think that an exchange along those lines was too much to expect, was it? 


Maybe I've over-reacted. Maybe I've taken this whole experience too personally. Maybe feeling a shudder of revulsion whenever I walk past the Apple store is stupid and immature. I should just put it down to bad luck, and give them a second chance. The problem is, when the rest of the world is constantly eulogizing about everything Apple does, it exacerbates my own negative feelings towards them. The rest of the world has veneration. I have resentment. 


Everything about the Apple store disturbs me. The clinical, futuristic, minimalistic design, the reverent ambience, the identikit youthful t-shirted employees who circulate with their debit machines among the customers like acolytes in a temple to hi-tech desire, beneath the high altar of the "Genius Bar". I feel like I'm entering a dystopian future world where everyone has been lobotomized and stares dead-eyed at shiny screens that batter them remorselessly into subconscious obedience with a relentless succession of music videos and cutesy video games.


But yeah, maybe I'm over-thinking it. My problem with Apple is essentially a mild form of PTSD following one unsatisfactory customer service experience. But I cherish my hostility, because it reminds me that there are cracks in the all-powerful monolith.


"Oh my god, it's full of stars." Yes, and also at least one douchebag who lost you a customer for life.


Post-script
I've been looking forward to writing this part of the blog for a while, because when I think about Apple I mostly think about what happened to me on this particular occasion. Parts one and two were basically a long-winded introduction; an overture... that bit at the start of the musical when the orchestra runs through a musical mash up of all the tunes that will come later in the main show. 


In part IV, I try and make sense of all this, survey the current situation, and draw some pithy conclusions.