A dear friend called to tell me that his holiday -- and his $3,000 laptop -- was ruined by incompetent bench technicians and customer reps playing the blame game at his local Apple retail store.

when my best friend of over 30 years, Mark, called me on the phone to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving holiday and describe his tale of woe to me, I was utterly stunned.

Mark, who lives in Long Island, N.Y., where we both grew up, had an issue with his 2013-era MacBook Pro. Specifically, he noticed the anti-glare coating on his screen was deteriorating.

After consulting with customer support on the phone, Apple acknowledged it was a known issue and instructed him to bring it to his local Apple retail location at the Walt Whitman Mall, where they would repair it free of charge.

The long and short of the story is that after five -- now going on six -- separate visits to the store, the laptop came back in worse condition than it arrived.

An incompetent bench technician fried the main logic board and the I/O board while re-assembling the machine, and the store blamed the problem on a third-party Broadcom Wi-Fi module that Mark had swapped out with the OEM original.

Keep in mind the original reason for the visit: The screen glass needed replacement due to a defective anti-glare coating. There was no reason to mess with the system logic.

He now has a computer that has no functioning Wi-Fi and is being asked to pay $134-plus in parts for a machine that Apple is going to refuse to service in two months time, because Apple only supports systems for five years.

After opening up the system to put back the OEM Wi-Fi card (as requested by his CSR before Apple could resume work on his computer), my friend discovered that the internal cabling was not re-installed correctly and that a short -- due to an incorrectly re-installed power supply by the bench technician -- may have damaged the system, which they are now asking him to pay additional money to repair.

As an authorized service center for any OEM, if you damage someone's system during the course of a repair, it is incumbent on the service center to return the system to good functioning order or to replace the system entirely -- regardless of the cost incurred by the service center.

You busted the thing on the operating table. It is now your problem. No blaming customer installed peripherals, etc., which are unrelated to the reason why the system is on the bench.

What happened to Mark is unconscionable. We're not talking about just any repair center here; this is an Apple retail location in a high-traffic mall.

I know you are probably asking for more details. So, I have asked Mark to write a detailed letter to CEO Tim Cook's office explaining the sequence of events, because no Apple store should provide such awful customer service in which the customer is being blamed for mistakes that were made by their own bench techs.

They should be ashamed of themselves. And, at a bare minimum, Apple should replace his computer.

Every person in management who made excuses to cover their asses and who was involved in this ridiculous blame game and the incompetent bench technician who damaged this system by putting it together so haphazardly should face consequences.

This is the freaking Apple store in a busy New York City suburb of 1.5 million people -- not a vintage TV repair shop in a one-stoplight town. Apple should be hiring the best bench techs they can find.

Source: zdnet