daily awesome internet finds
I'm Andy Thompson. By day, I'm Creative Director at an awesome company called onebluebrick ™ (proof). By night.... well, same thing, but I also tend to waste my time tweeting absolutely worthless bits of information to a group of random people who for some reason like to hear that kind of thing. I used to be in a band, but now record mostly noise.
Thursday February 4

Apple FTW!

About two months ago, I made a stupid decision. After being plagued with a non-working trackball on my Apple Mighty Mouse, I decided to call in and see if I could get a replacement (again, but thats another story). As usual, everyone I spoke to at Apple was accommodating and happily shipped me out a new mouse. I received it two days later, dropped the non-working one in the box, peeled back the shipping label, and dropped it into the Fedex drop box down the street from me.

Huge mistake. Apparently, drop boxes are, to Apple, the equivalent of drop kicking your package over the Hudson. The package was never scanned, so neither Fedex nor Apple could do anything about it, which means it was either stolen out of the box (nearly impossible) or a Fedex employee has a used broken mouse fetish (highly probable). My only outlet for frustration was to file a claim with Fedex, and in the meantime Apple took $75 dollars out of my bank account (how they can charge more than the retail price for a mouse they don’t even sell anymore is a different story). Throughout this, Fedex treated me like a liar and a thief, but there wasn’t much I could do.

This week (nearly a month after my claim was filed) I got a letter from the good folks at Fedex saying that my claim was denied, but if I had a “cash reciept to prove FedEx handled this shipment”, they’d be happy to talk. In the meantime, they said “hope you will continue to count on us for reliable, high-quality delivery services.” Ha.

So anyways, long boring story short, I just realized that I should give Apple a call back and see if, by some stroke of luck, the package got to them by some weird, back-channel pony express or something. I was put in touch with a repair rep, who seemed genuinely sympathetic. He told me he’d talk to higher ups and give me a call back. Literally two minutes later I got a call from an incredibly nice lady who told me not to worry, they’d reimburse my money, and “sorry I had to deal with this nonsense”.

So, thank you Colleen @ Apple, for not only refunding my money, but for also fixing a problem that was entirely FedEx’s fault. I’m posting this here now because, in this process, I’ve found countless websites and comment threads discussing lost Apple repairs. The solution for this is simple: NEVER PUT ANYTHING YOU WANT TO SEE AGAIN IN A FEDEX (or any other shipper) DROP BOX.