Today, for the second time ever, I got bad service at Apple’s Genius Bar. And, for the second time, I cried about it.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t cry easily. I’ve been treated poorly by customer service people before, and I never cry about it. But I’m batting 1000 with the Apple Store. A bad experience = tears.

So now I’m thinking about how I respond to customer service. Why do I react so strongly to Apple? Is it because I have such high standards for the Apple Store that it’s harder to stomach when it’s not good?  Have I grown so used to being treated badly other places that it just doesn’t bother me as much?

I think it’s a bit of both, and it’s sad. Both that I hold the Apple Store to such high standards (seriously, people mess up. It sucks, but tears? Come on!) but also that I have such low standards in other situations that this would have urked me, but I wouldn’t have been that mad about it.

In case you’re not familiar, the Genius Bar is really not a bar at all anymore, but a group of Apple employees that are there simply to help you with your products. They trouble shoot, do little maintenance things, and handhold. All for the low low price of nothing. Zilch. Even if your machine is out of warranty and four years old (in computer years, that’s like 150) they’ll help you out. Even if you’re still rocking the original iPod. If it can be fixed, they’ll do their darnedest to make it happen.

Except when they don’t.

The first time I cried at the Genius Bar was in Nashville. Austin was two weeks old (he’d spent the first week in the NICU, so he’d only been home for a week) and I had to start working again. Remotely, but still, I had to be available to serve my clients. And the monitor of my Macbook laptop had died for the second time. The computer was still under warranty. When the screen died the first time they told me if it happened again the computer would need to be replaced. That day, though, I was told the computer needed to be sent in for repair that could take up to two weeks.

The man went in the back, I put my head down on the counter and cried. (To be fair, it was mostly because I was exhausted and stressed about going back to work, and not so much about the computer.) When he saw me, he said, “Be right back” and came back with a new machine that he kindly swapped out. It was kind of like crying to get out of a ticket, except I didn’t do it on purpose, I was just genuinely sad.

Today it was much less dramatic. Last week I took my computer to the Genius Bar because it was shutting itself off (super fun) and the only solution was to wipe it. Rather than being able to restore from a backup, I had to manually rebuild it because there was no way to tell what program had been causing the problems. Then I could pull the few things I needed (Microsoft Office and My Documents) from my backup disk. Except today, when I plugged in my backup disk, it wouldn’t let me pull anything, so I made an appointment and headed to the store.

I’m not going to go into everything that happened, because, honestly, it’s boring and doesn’t matter. The gist is, they were short handed, someone who didn’t know what he was doing told me to do something (and, because I was at The Genius Bar, I listened) and it caused my computer to be wiped clean again. So now I’m looking forward to an evening of re-setting up my computer from scratch, again. (There’s no backup of the new system because I was afraid to overwrite old backups.) I don’t think the person that “helped” me was purposefully rude or condescending, but he was. He was the keeper of the schedule, and he had the actual Geniuses skip me. He told me, in so many words, to suck it up and re-buy Office because “it’s not that expensive.” And through it all, he never once apologized.

I talked to the manager, but there’s really nothing that can be done. I don’t want the poor guy fired or anything. There’s no fee to be refunded, there’s nothing they can do to make the setup faster. I came home, and started working on setting up the new computer. Then something came up for work, and the idea of trying to find all my passwords and get into what I needed to  do was too much. I started crying.