At 10,000 feet, the flight attendant on my flight from LaGuardia to Denver (and then on to Ontario, California for Podcast Expo) informed us that it was now safe to use our personal electronic devices. I pulled my Mac PowerBook G4 out of my briefcase, fired it up, and got to work on the presentation I had been preparing for my talk at the Expo.

After about five minutes, the beach ball of doom began spinning on my desktop. I sighed and invoked the “Force Quit” option, but nothing happened. After trying that a few more times, I did a hard shutdown and rebooted.

Except it wouldn’t reboot. All I got was a grey screen with a small icon of a file folder in the middle. Inside the folder, the Mac OS logo alternated with a question mark. I tried rebooting a few times, getting the same result.

It was about 6:20 p.m. when we landed in Denver and I had about 90 minutes between flights, so I settled myself into the Red Carpet Club and called Apple, which informed me its technical support offices were closed and that I should call back during normal business hours. Hmm. I guess everybody else has problems with their Apple products between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Pacific time. How strange to be the only one with a problem outside those hours.

I called the Apple store where I bought the PowerBook. The folks I spoke with were great in their unsuccessful efforts to help me. But they did suggest that the icon meant the OS was corrupt and I could restore it with a system disk. I don’t travel with my system disk, so I was pretty much hosed for both the Expo presentation and a report I was supposed to finish for a client. I was tempted to make a trip to a computer superstore about 10 miles from Ontario, but finally dismissed that idea, figuring I’d just repair the OS when I got home on Sunday. It’s a good thing I didn’t spend $100 on a new system disk.

My efforts to repair the OS were for naught. When the repair process got to the point where I needed to identify the drive, the hard drive didn’t show up. I called Apple—this time during office hours—and they told me to take the laptop to my local Apple store. They could get the data of the drive and replace it. The whole thing should take about half an hour if the part was in stock; otherwise, they’d have to ship it to a repair center, and that could take 10 days. I’m doing presentations Thursday and Friday this week and next week on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I need a laptop. So I rushed on over to the Apple store, where I got an entirely different story.

The hard drive had failed, and they did not do data recovery (absolutely contrary to what I was told by technical support on the phone). They gave me the card of a data recovery service to which I would have to ship the entire laptop. I asked if they could swap the drives and let me send the bad one to the data repair service, allowing me to reinstall software, get back up and running, and make my presentations.

(Before you ask, yes, I do back up my data. But I’d worked on a dozen documents while on the road, and they’re all important.)

I knew, from Heidi Miller‘s experience, what was coming next. “No,” I was told; “when we swap the drive, we keep the old one. So if you want to have the data recovered, you have to do that first, then bring the laptop in to have a new drive installed.”

Heidi had managed to convince the folks at the Chicago Apple store to let her leave a deposit so she could have both the new and old drive. No such luck in Walnut Creek, California. That means I have no laptop for my presentations this week and next. Which, in turn, means I have to buy a new laptop. And I’ll be damned if it’ll be an Apple. Say what you like about Windows PCs, but when a hard drive fails, it’s still my hard drive, and I get both the old one and the new one. That alone is enough to make me swear off Apples for the rest of my life.

Does Apple think for a minute that business people can wait up to 20 days for a laptop to be repaired? And why should they keep a hard drive that I paid for when I bought the laptop? And why should a hard drive fail after only 18 months (and it’s not my primary computer)?

The answers to these questions don’t matter to me, since I’ll never have to ponder them again. Now to go pick my new Sony VAIO…