First name of the Oregon State Trooper who stopped at the scene of my accident: Ryan.
First name of the Apple Store Genius who confirmed the damaged hard drive in my MacBook Pro: Ryan.
The wait at the Genius Bar was about a half-hour after my Concierge “scheduled” time, which would normally be quite irritating, especially on a Saturday during Hell Month (which is what current and former retail employees call the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas; I still have nightmares about my 6 Christmases working at the mall). But for whatever reason I was patient, and I was friendly with Ryan the Genius. He booted the laptop on an external drive, ran Disk Utitlity, saw the error, noted it, and filled out the paperwork for the repair.
The longest delay was when he tried to find out if they had the drive in stock, but no luck. They’d have to order it, which wouldn’t arrive ’til Tuesday, at best.
Hush, hush, keep it down now. Voices carry. Argh.
The best part, though, was when Apple Genius Ryan (they must get so much shit because Apple decided to call their tech support “Geniuses”) found out I was using Quicken. I mentioned it as the one file I would like them to save off the hard drive if they could. He started asking me about setting Quicken up to download transactions from Bank of America. Heh. I tried to help as best I could (I could use a little karma this weekend) but I’m afraid my vague answers were unsatisfying. Hey, at least I tried.
So I’m new sexy thing-less until the end of the week, assuming the part comes in as expected, they get the repair done quickly, and they don’t decide the drive failed due to negligence on my part, which Apple can do (as I know too well, having worked in Apple tech support in Austin, TX in a previous life). Ugh.
Gee… sure would be nice to have an iPhone right about now…