Three years ago, after fielding months of frustrated phone calls from my mother to help troubleshoot her ailing PC, my persistent lobbying for her to purchase a Macintosh finally paid off. Within a week, our phone conversations resumed their normal peaceful tone and we only talked computers to discuss how great her new iMac was working out.

But as users and computers tend toward entropy, eventually the phone calls started again--less frequently than before, and I could usually solve the problems more quickly. Nevertheless, we were ramping up toward a Tech Support Crisis in short order and upon my last visit I discovered that despite Apple's best attempts to make OS X easy to use, it's only just this side of impossible for a menopausal woman in her 50s to navigate without leaving me with cold sweats and trembling.

Much of this isn't exactly Apple's fault. I'd like to thank the developers at Western Digital personally for implementing a notification window that pops up every single time a file is backed up to the external drive. One of the great things about a reliable backup system is that you don't have to worry about it, so I can only assume that by knowing about the status of each and every file as it gets transferred, blinding irritation is not the user experience they were aiming for. Oh, you can turn it off, sure, but if you're not a computer-savvy type, you might be worried that you're turning off your whole backup system, not just the WD equivalent of Clippy, the World's Most Annoying UI Feature of All Time.

My attitude toward data backups has been embarrassingly cavalier throughout my tenure as a computer user. The fact that I've lost very, very little data over so many years is a blessing of luck. Time Machine was my first honest backup system, and Leopard came out, what--a year ago? So it was to my absolute (and admittedly naive) shock that no more than four weeks after leaving my mom's house, (and two months after her Applecare expired) I received a call on the red phone that her internal hard drive had in fact failed catastrophically, and she was taking her iMac into the Apple store that afternoon.

No problem, I thought, because she has been backing up her crucial files for as long as I've known her to own a computer. Since her Applecare expired, it's going to cost some money, but all will be well thanks to Apple's great wealth of Geniuses and customer service.

It's worth mentioning that I received this call while on a road trip to visit my dad, so my availability to actually help was very limited. This becomes important later, in the chapter where I spend $100 on roaming fees while driving from Montana to Seattle talking my mom through the file restoration process. If you know the road then you know that cell phone reception is limited to line of sight signal paths along straight sections of road, of which there are approximately four between Helena and Coeur d'Alene. I expect my phone bill is 40 or 50 pages thick with a profusion of 1-3 minute calls all within a couple of hours.

The next call I got went something like this. "Well, I don't know what happened but the guy at the store replaced our hard drive, but he wouldn't give us the old one back. He told us that if we didn't like it we could go someplace else he didn't help us restore any of our backed up files and now I'm home and I have files everywhere and I don't know what to do."

It turns out that, as part of the service agreement, Apple does in fact not return your original failed parts. These are presumably whisked off to a team of engineers deep within the bowels of Cupertino who take the item apart and study how and why they failed. If this is your video card, no big deal. But if this is a hard drive with the last fifteen years of your financial data on it, you might be concerned that the guy at the Apple store with the bad attitude and the short temper doesn't have your best interests in mind. Or your mom's, since she didn't seem to immediately connect with my fears. (Further research would turn up information that, while it is not Apple's policy to return your bad parts, you can purchase them back for a small fee. Weird enough, but now a moot point since Mom and computer were at home while the hard drive was no longer in her possession.) But in either case, this was a far cry from the kind of service I expected from Apple--a company whose sole existence is about delivering great customer experience. To say I was unhappy was an understatement. My mom is not a doddering old lady who can't find the Any Key or who puts her coffee cup on the CD tray. She's a sweet, patient woman who has been a dental hygenist, Xerox technician and was at one point pursuing a career in GIS. I pushed hard to have both my parents buy Apple computers specifically because of their quality and service, and now one asshat at a mall in Denver was undermining not only my faith in Apple, but my mom's faith in me. We had a problem, Houston.

With a little encouragement, I talked my mom into giving Apple customer service a call to describe her experience at the store. Her first call went to tech support and instead of getting much sympathy she got most of her data restored which, though helpful, didn't make her feel a lot better about Apple. I sent her back to the phone, this time directly to customer service.

Within minutes the service rep had my mom booked for an extended appointment at the Apple store, gratis, complete with an apology and a concerted investigation into the identity of the employee who "helped" her previously. At the store, she was greeted by both a friendly Genius as well as the store manager and was taken to a back room where the gentleman sat with her for hours, helping her recover her data. He installed the 2GB of RAM that she bought, a complimentary upgrade of iLife and, because they had run out of time for the day, he asked her to come back in the morning. At that point, I got a phone call wherein my mom not only extolled the virtues of Apple, but thanked me for encouraging her to call them in the first place.

The next day--today--she met with the same Genius and he installed a fresh copy of Leopard, set up her external drive to work with Time Machine, and installed a free upgrade for Quicken. My mom called me this afternoon to, again, thank me and say that she was trying to figure out how to send the folks at the Apple store a thank you gift.

The moral of this story is self-evident, but I'll say it anyway: Customer service wins, and Apple knows how to do it right. Had I expected anything less, we wouldn't have gotten past the conversation about her poor treatment in the first place, and I'm delighted to know that Apple delivers on their promises. The fact that they made us both look like heroes just hits it out of the park. Thanks, Apple.