My iPhone crapped out on me last week. I marked the time of death as 2:10 PM Thursday. It’s tombstone would say: 2009-2009. It was the day before I was heading to Boston. I called into the service line twice and, despite everyone’s best efforts, it would take a couple of shallow breaths and then, quickly, dash any hopes of resucitation.

Ironically, my 18 year-old college son, who has a Zune, scoffs at my Apple products. Maybe he has a point about their planned obsolescence, but maybe it’s just my bad luck.

So anyway, the next morning, I went into the Apple store in Oak Brook, Illinois, where I met with a “genius.” Not sure if that was an accurate description, but he looked smart enough. The long and short of it was he was pleasant, listened (as opposed to acting like he was listening) and tried a couple of possible solutions. When those didn’t work, he took about 90 seconds of rummaging and programming, and handed me a new iPhone. The whole process took about 10 minutes. No paperwork to speak of. All my contacts and apps were right there – a freakish clone of my first iPhone.

I tried to imagine the same thing happening with T-Mobile, and I laughed to myself.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 1:35 pm and is filed under customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, irrational customer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.