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Comment by vkoskiv | Hacker News Reader

Only for US citizens. I received communications on the progress of this thing for years, kind of a letdown.

I have to assume there isn't a special case for that time I happened to be in the US, booked a Genius bar appointment, and the Genius promptly ruined the spacebar on my keyboard, and just straight up lied to my face about it. By far the most bizarre interaction I have ever had with another human face to face.

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I took my car into a dealership near work once because it'd been hit by a coworker in the car park. While at the dealership the rear windscreen somehow was shattered, but they didn't tell me about it for a week, and didn't want to pay for fixing it. They eventually did, but left all the broken glass in my boot. Some people are shameless :)

The 'Genius' at that Maine Apple Store was absolutely intentional in his behavior. Initially he just returned from the back, plopped my machine on the table, told me I'm all set and quickly took off before I could even inspect the machine. When I found him again and showed him that the spacebar wasn't depressing at all anymore and wasn't registering keypresses, he took it to the back again, made it slightly better (by hastily ripping out the rubber dampening membrane out), I confronted him about it again, pointed out that the dampening membrane was missing, and he just said to me he doesn't see anything wrong. I was absolutely floored, I had never seen a person behave that way before at that point. And come to think of it, not even since then.

This is one of the few times where it makes sense to talk to a manager or higher.

Many times frontline employees are purposely made powerless to assist with an issue where it’s very simple for a manager to fix something.

Even when frontline employees say “my manager will say the same thing” I’ve found that they often won’t and will easily resolve the issue.

Companies that do this simply don’t want to resolve your problem.

Minor correction: It's for all persons (including immigrants) and entities in the United States, not just the Citizens. :)

At the Stanford shopping mall Apple Store, they told me that they don’t even try to fix space bars there because they’re so tricky, and can end up making matters worse. Whenever a space bar needs work, they literally send it to Texas.

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