Conclusion: 8.5/10
I got into work today, plugged in my MacBook Pro to power, USB keyboard/mouse, network cable, and secondary display…. wait a minute, second display is still in power saving mode, that’s odd.
OK, reboot. Nothing. Unplug, replug. Nothing. Troubleshoot by checking to see if the monitor works with another computer (it does), if the computer can output to a different DVI monitor (it could), and if a different DVI-to-VGA dongle worked (it didn’t).
Bleah. I guess this is why $work got the AppleCare plan for me though, so I called up the number….
First of all, up to the part when you get on hold was great. There was none of the horrible voice-recognition systems that I’ve learned to despise and there were only three buttons to hit to get to where I wanted to be (1 for english, 1 for support, and 3 for laptops). However, once I got into the queue and waited for the five or so minutes they predicted the wait time would be, it rang, then I got nothing. After waiting for a couple of minutes with no hold music and no voice on the other end, I rang up and redialed.
The second time through I found that you could hit the number options before the full set of options has completed, bonus points for that. This time after the five minutes listening to elevator music I did actually get to talk to a real person (Stacy, who didn’t sound like she was a call center in Bangladesh or some similar place).
Other than a bit of confusion as I had switched out the monitor that wasn’t working for another monitor that also wasn’t working (she thought that I meant that the old monitor worked and the new one didn’t), and some standard troubleshooting which I had already done, then a couple of minutes more on hold while she consulted co-workers, she got me to do the vulcan neck pinch reboot (command-option power on then hold down P and R while standing on one leg at sunset of a full moon while the eclipse is in the northern hemisphere) to reset the PRAM. Voila, problem solved.
Pros
- Got the problem fixed (most important thing)
- Speaker had english as a first language
- Only 3 buttons to get to wait on hold
- Can hit buttons before voice finishes speaking
- No voice recognition software
Cons
- Was disconnected / frozen randomly on first call
- Wait time of 5 minutes each time (though these days that’s still pretty low
- Sucks that the problem happened in the first place!
All in all a pretty good experience