As an engineer, you probably have 10+ computers at any one time, and every once in a while, you’ll get a bad one. A bad hard disc, or flaky memory, or an airport card that doesn’t work.

Customers get those bad machines too, although not as frequently.

The big difference is that Apple engineers get to take borked machines to on-site, but the customers aren’t so lucky.

If you have a production machine with no internal software, try calling AppleCare sometime for support. Or even better, help fix a family member’s machine, and give AppleCare a call. It’s a painful process.. The friendly person who answers the phone will try to convince you that your hardware problem is really a software problem. It’s both interesting and sad to see what Mom or Dad has to put up with.

Even scarier is going to the Genius bar. I took my brother and his iBook (G3, with the recalled logic board) to the Apple Store in LA. They were packed and running way behind on the appointments, so we sat at the Genius Bar for an hour and listened to the Genius give bad/wrong advice to every customer in line before us.

Navigating the support structure is painful. I’m not exactly sure how to fix it, but there is something to be said about eating your own dog food.. Every engineer should use the same support system that customers use, at least once.

Filed under: support |