Dear Apple Customer:

Recently, you contacted Apple support using Apple's online web support form. We're very interested in getting your feedback regarding your support experience.

If you have a moment, we hope that you'll take our support survey. The survey should take less than 5 minutes to complete.

Did you find Apple's Customer Support to be helpful?

[ ] Yes.

Do you have any additional comments you would like to make?

I recently sent in a complaint about a few iTunes purchases that would not work on my iPod, and promptly forgot about it, expecting that I'd get form response sometime that week.

I was surprised, then, when I got an email the next day from a human, detailing a concise, clear, and practical response (delete the songs from the library, sync, the iPod, download them again), along with another FAQ to consult in case that didn't work.

Years of working with computers and being beset by bizarre, inane, and stubborn difficulties has led me to distrust clear and practical tech support. I much prefer the branch of tech support that involves buying candles and pigeons. It never works any better than the practical solutions, of course, but it has its own merits - there's a kind of comfort that comes from making a sacrifice to some Dark God and getting no response.

(After going through the e-mail, I decided to just bite the bullet and restore my iPod. It didn't make the songs play any better, but it did get all the rest of that pesky "music" off my iPod, so there's that, I guess.)

After expending even that option, I read through the e-mail again, hoping that maybe there was another suggestion in there, somewhere. There wasn't, but there was a line saying to reply if my problem persisted - and I planned to, really. But then a friend showed up with some tickets to a show, and then I had work the next day, and then there were those Christmas cards I've been meaning to write...

So in the end, I just gave up, and bought a book instead - "Villa Incognito." It's okay, I guess, except a printing error left about a hundred or so pages out of my copy. I'm pretty sure if I read and listen at the same time, my technical difficulties will balance out and I'll come out of the experience having done a whole pastime somewhere in there.

Cheers.

Thanks for your feedback! We're totally going to read all that, we promise. Just, uh, quick thing, though, if you could summarize that really quickly...

[ ] Apple is Awesome, I love Apple.


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The Apple Online Support Team