This past Wednesday, my new disk arrived and I couldn't wait to pop it in and begin the next chapter. The plan was to install Snow Leopard fresh on the new drive and peacemeal my data from a Time Machine backup. I didn't have the necessary Torx bit at home to get the housing off of the old disk, so I took the whole mess to work with me yesterday.

I got in early and waited for our IT guy (a good friend of mine) to arrive and give me a hand, since I've been out of the fixing computers game for several happy years now. We got the tools and I removed the old drive, changed the housing onto the new drive and attempted to install it. I didn't realize that there were a pair of rubber bumpers bookending the drive bay, so when I put it back in and it felt a bit snug, I gave it a good shove and it seemed to get in there just fine. I later discovered that I had actually stripped off one of the rubber strips and crumpled it up nicely against the SATA connectors where the drive would connect. After a brief attempt to remove it, I gave up and booked 20 minutes at the Genius Bar.

When I arrived today, I had pretty much convinced myself that I was going to have to pay handsomely to fix my newb mistake, which didn't please me. My name was called, I walked up to the man with the 8-inch goatee and started to explain what I had done.

"I was going to install the new hard drive, but when I slid it into the bay, it felt a little snug..."

"Ah, you dislodged one of the little rubber pads, right?"

"Uh, yeah" (sheepishly)

He went on to chide me a little for not having them do it instead, and I was tempted to respond that this was not, in fact, my first rodeo. But I decided that to act like a know-it-all prick would probably earn me the know-it-all prick tax, so I kept my trap shut. Besides, there was a reason I was standing there talking to him instead of installing Snow Leopard.

He quickly removed both rubber pads, explaining that they weren't even really necessay because the brackets and battery did a fine job of keeping the thing right where it was supposed to be. Then, he whispered "you didn't see me do this", and quickly reassbled the drive and the casing and slid it into the drive bay while explaining the proper steps to follow for my Snow Leopard install. None of this cost me a penny.

As a guy who knows what it's like to work for free, I appreciated that this fellow took what amounted to 10 seconds of his life to install my new drive properly when he could have just as easily handed it all back to me in pieces and said, "Good luck!" I think he recognized that those 10 seconds in his brain and hands would have translated to a good deal longer in mine. I respect people like this guy because I often find myself in the same boat (easy for me, hard for just about everybody else). It really got me thinking about how much less bitching and moaning I should do when a family member asks me to take a look at their email.

Anyway, another great customer service experience at the apple store. If this is what I get for buying an "overpriced" computer, then let me overspend again because having those folks around is seriously awesome.