Today's Verse




Friday, August 7, 2009

Not All Superheros Wear Capes

Yesterday, Katie and I made a quick trip to Ft. Worth. Not for shopping, not for visiting, not for going to the zoo. No, this trip had one goal - The Apple Store.
Remember this post, my peaceful Monday turned manic, and when Katie's iPhone shattered? Well, here is a picture of said phone...

Not pretty, I know. I called the iPhone people to see what procedures I was to follow and did so to perfection and waited patiently for that little email that told me what was to be done about her phone. That email never came. Instead we got her phone back in the same packaging I had sent it to them in, only with an additional note that said they had determined that the shattered screen was because the phone had been dropped. If it had been dropped, I promised it hit the ground no where as hard as my jaw did when I read this. My heart just sank. So Katie and I decided to take it to our local AT&T store to see if there was anything they could do.

Several people in the store looked at her phone and all asked the same question - "How did this happen? You can see the phone has not been dropped." Ugh! We know that! Unfortunately, even though no one believed the phone had been dropped there was nothing they could do. It has to be handled through Apple. The closest store is in Ft. Worth. They also told us to make an appointment before we go because they usually don't have any openings for walk in customers. (Excuse me? Why do you even have a store in the strip mall then?)

So Katie takes all the information they have given her and goes online to make the appointment. The earliest appointment is on 12:20PM, Thursday August 6, two weeks later! Oh My! I take off work so she doesn't have to make the trip by herself and to help her plead her case.

Thursday morning, we get Mattie May to day care, stop at Sonic for some breakfast and LARGE sodas and head east. Before we leave the house, I plug the address of the Apple store into A.B. (our GPS) not because I can't head east on I-20 and find Ft. Worth, but so we don't have to try and follow the map to the Apple store.

We arrive at 11:00 AM, an hour and a half early. They won't even let us put her name on the list and we have to go next door to try to find a public restroom (remember the LARGE sodas from Sonic! LOL) Next door is William Sonoma and Pottery Barn, two stores I have only read about but have never entered, but they have a wonderfully clean restroom and I have fallen in love! And now I know they are only two hours and twenty four minutes from my house! Because we were having so much fun looking at everything, I set the alarm on my phone for 11:50 AM to get us back to Apple in plenty of time and hopefully back on the road a bit sooner.

Katie checks in at about 11:55 AM and her name immediately shows up on the wait screen as #10, not to bad. We start looking around to see what wonderful things we can only dream about owning and Katie looks up and her name has already moved to #7. I continue my text to Traci about all the wonders of this store that she needs to avoid at all cost (LOL) and some one behind us asked "Katie, what do you need help with?" It's Patrick!

This is Patrick...



He is the person that will be helping us. Katie begins telling him the whole story about how the phone shattered as she starts pulling it out of the box. He takes the phone from her and immediately says "I can tell this phone hasn't been dropped. Stay right here and I will be right back." He takes her phone and disappears behind a blue door. The next time we see him he is standing behind one of the computers at the back of the store and waves us over.

There on the counter in front of him is ....



HER PHONE!

He has replaced the screen and because she had the phone for such a short time when this happened, there is no charge! That's it, done repaired, no tears needed (this sort of disappointed Katie), all smiles and we are ready to go!

PATRICK! OUR HERO!
(If you can't read his shirt, it is the same as the title of this post! And as far as we're concerned, he is a superhero!)

My biggest question is, why couldn't the place I had to send the broken phone into have done this same thing before they sent the phone back? It took him all of five minutes to do this. We did enjoy the trip though. We rarely get to just go anywhere just the two of us any more. And we did find two favorite new stores (Frank won't be so happy about this come Christmas), but for such a simple procedure, why? Oh well. Katie has her phone and the world is at piece now! LOL

1 comment:

Julie said...

YAY for everyday heroes! Sometimes you just need to get your item in front of a real person IN person to get something accomplished!