Oh, Best Buy… couldn’t you provide a better solution?

I took my ailing 20G iPod back to Best Buy tonight, all cables and peripheral chargers included. The fledgling nerd behind the counter listened to my complaint and gave me a slightly knowitall-ish line about “usually the batteries just stop working in these things or last forever, its rare that they lose their charge that severely without breaking.”

I explained to him about the test that I did and presented my service plan.

It took him about five minutes to process the service request, and unfortunately they reqiure that my iPod be shipped to their repair center in Minnesota and have the battery tested and replaced there.

He said that process usually take TWO WEEKS.

I protested slightly at this, asking if they could swap out for a loner in the meantime and they said that no they couldn’t. He gave some story about if they did that then the defective one became “theirs” and they can’t sell a defective product. I felt like telling him that I didn’t directly care if they could sell it, I cared that I have to go without something I own for two weeks because of their store policy. I decided against that because it was obvious that Chippy The Sixteen Year Old Nerd couldn’t do anything but process service requests.

I hope that my iPod returns to me before two weeks is up, but if it takes that long to get good battery life then so be it. I’ll just make do by burning a few physical CDs (so 1990’s, I know!) and listen to them for the next few weeks.