1993 – Bridget started out defending the contract without even looking at it. She opted to replace lunge-and-parry logic, with some off-brand intimidating confidence that must have worked on the frightened garden-variety college students who normally ended up in her office. Bridget was an administrative VP who saw herself as a big fish in a very small pond. To me she was just very big feet in very small shoes.

She didn’t regard me as much. I was just some smart ass with the school newspaper who scribbled funny ha-ha columns for giggles. I didn’t run in the student government circles she had swimming happy laps in her office aquarium. And it wasn’t until I put the crippled contract in front of her and pointed out a single faulty line in the language that she looked up from her world, and quickly gave me 100% of her attention.

She’d tried holding her ground, at first with primitive reflex and dusty entitlement, but then in earnest when she realized the contract I’d put into her hands, her department’s contract, had one big hemorrhaging hole right in the middle of it: a contract on which may have balanced millions of dollars from a major portion of the student population. And sitting in front of her was the now dead serious writer – holding a grenade but no pin – who’d found it.

Feeling the edge of the cliff under her heels, she reached into her purse and pulled out four crisp one-hundred dollar bills. Her face changed from a tense scowl to a sly smile as she laid Benji out on the desk in front of me. There was something very Ned Beatty about her, the way she smirked, the way she rested the bills down one at a time as if each were a corner stone of some deeper understanding. And I’ll never forget the sight of her feet spilling out of her fancy shoes.

Before I left her office, she held the document in front of her, smiled genuinely, and said, “Our best and brightest lawyers and officials spent a lot of time and money creating this contract. We all thought it was perfect. Nobody saw the weak link until you.”

Me. The customer.

2010 – My new Apple laptop, $2000 and 15 inches of supreme MacBook Pro confidence, has been acting funny all month. Last Friday a Genius narrowed it down to something with the Airport card, but he’d have to send it somewhere to make sure, and to have it fixed. Shipping it somewhere seemed like a drastic measure to just replace the Airport card, and I wasn’t prepared to be without it for a week. But I’ve been a loyal Apple user and fan for years, and felt Apple would only have my best interests in mind.

They gave me something to initial. It read:

. . .”I accept that Apple is not responsible for any loss, corruption or breach of the data on my product during service.”

And a second line that read:

. . .”I assume the risk that the data on my product may be lost, corrupted or compromised during service.”

When I saw this, I felt a pretty high degree of confidence that if my information were to be lost, or breached, or corrupted, it wouldn’t be at the hands of an incompetent Apple technician. There is very little “risk” when it comes to the very specialized talents these people have, as they make few mistakes that would cause major loss of data.

It would instead be due to Godly acts reflected by the words lost, corrupted, or breached, acts of The Holy Host including but not being limited to UPS or FED EX plane crashes, lightening strikes, or Al Qaeda cyber attacks. Surely Apple couldn’t be held accountable for those – unfortunate losses, unforeseeable corruptions, or unavoidable breaches. Losses, corruptions, breaches and compromises – all things outside of Apple’s control.

And an act of God comes in at around a .5% or at most a .75% chance of likelihood. All my chips on red, please.

Today my phone rang, and it was my local Apple store telling me my laptop was back. They’d replaced the card. They’d reloaded the operating system, and everything was great.

Naturally I started the machine at the store. But instead of finding “everything great,” and all of my information nestled comfortably in a new clean operating system, I found that my hard drive had been completely wiped clean, and all of my information trashed, not by an unfortunate loss, or a corruption or a breach, but because someone had intentionally done so, 100% on purpose. I was told that this is often, “standard operating procedure.”

The little pierced and tattooed hipster before me in the Apple t-shirt knew what was up pretty quickly, as he reached for the work order and pointed to my initials. “Not responsible,” he said, and finished with, “Didn’t someone tell you they’d wipe it?”

“Fuck no!” I shot back! “Don’t you think that had you guys told me there was a probability you’d erase my information – ON PURPOSE – that I’d back it up before giving it to you?”

The dude kept running back to the work order, pointing to my initials. “Not responsible! Not responsible!” But he knew. He disappeared and returned five minutes later with another, yet somehow devolved hipster-slacker hybrid with a ponytail and a pre-installed worried look on his face.

“This is one of our tech managers,” he said while backing up and pushing the discomfited-looking guy in front of me.

I asked this “manager,” that had some Genius told me they would likely wipe the computer on purpose, or that if there was even the chance, what did he think my response would be to that. He said, “I don’t know. I don’t know you!”

Brilliant.

This guy’s best effort was to turn the work order over, point to a page of gray fine print, and bark, “Didn’t you read this?” (The gray fine print, I later read, addressed nothing whatsoever on the subject of “The intentional trashing of all of your information.” Yeah, and this guy is an Apple “manager.”)

Suddenly I wondered what Steve Jobs would do were he standing there watching as a couple young Apple-brandlings butchered a clear case of “I trusted Apple, and Apple screwed the pooch.”
As Bridget, more than 15 years prior, erred on the side of hubris and vanity, so too did these kids, on behalf of Mr. Jobs himself.

I made it home and called Apple. Heather, an Apple Care rep, was floored at how it was handled, and asked for me to hold while she called the store to speak with the manager. She came back, also five minutes later, now quoting Apple scripture, herself.

“Not responsible.”

She delved into what Apple’s “intentions” were, or may have been regarding the words “loss, corruption and breach.” But as anyone can tell you, intentions mean nothing when it comes to contracts. Simply put, at no point, anywhere, was it communicated to me in any way, that my emails, proposals, invoices, pictures, web designs, addresses, columns, phone numbers, passwords, videos, bookmarks, settings, music, software, memories . . . Jesus . . . all of it, everything, was to be intentionally “trashed.” Not lost, not corrupted, not breached, but trashed. Hundreds of gigabytes of it.

But Heather, without giving Apple away, acknowledged my point, and is going to talk to her boss, on Tuesday, August 11, to see what steps need be taken.

I’ve been writing for years, and know that the best way for me to publish typos, grammatical errors, syntax flubs and outright trash is for me to check my own writing. If I want to find weak points, give it to the average Joe, and he or she is sure to find them.

I’m sure Apple has lawyers, experts, specialists, and lots of Geniuses holding down important Jobs [sic]. I’m sure they’ve read, read and reread to be read again these work orders and how they function in conjunction with what Geniuses and other Apple representatives tell customers about the safety of their data. But Apple apparently doesn’t have enough average Joes, and neither did Bridget, for mistakes keep ending up in contracts, only to be found by a simpleton like me.

Anthony wants to know, what do I mean to Apple? Really, what’s more important – the product, or the information and lifestyles and businesses and the trust Apple purports to facilitate and secure? Is it more important to acknowledge when someone’s been incredibly injured, and act accordingly, or to simply blame the customer when Apple drops the ball, effectively offering nothing more than a big greasy pimply “screw you?”

Right now it’s pretty unclear, contract, or no contract. And it pains me so.