You're Nice People. I'll Give You Monies.

I have a bit of a... troublesome patch with my iPods. My first one suffered the cruel fate of a lawn mowing incident. The next one suffered a more aqueous fate. Now the latest one has been acting odd as of late and several hours, system restores, re-formatts and a pass of badblocks later I found it had a hard drive riddled with bad blocks. I'm guessing the read heads were using the platters as a scratching post.

I needed hardware support here. Mind you I've never once meandered into the local Apple store, nevermind the Genius Bar. Yet I made an appointment, shuffled my way through and talked to the resident genius.

I was prepped and ready for a requests for long-lost receipts, RMA codes and waiting months for a refurbishment. So I met my genius, she listened to the symptoms, typed a while on her laptop and... handed me a new iPod.

Seriously, just like that.

The serial number was dutifully registered by iTunes and was shown to still be under warranty. So I signed for receipt of a new device and walked out the door. Ten minutes, tops.

What the eff? Why isn't life always this easy?

I'm sync'ing now and probably have a few hours to go. Small price to pay for instant gratification. I've given Apple lots of business; it's refreshing to see that they treat their customers with the same kind of loyalty.