When it comes to getting a real, living and knowledgeable person to have a look at whatever troubles I might be having with my Macintosh, I feel fortunate that our office is just four blocks away from Tekserve, hands down New York City’s most prominent Apple reseller and authorized repair center. I’ve always preferred it over the sales and support at the Apple Store (if for no other reason than they have a much more sensible and liberal attitude towards letting Mister President in the store), but when I’m at home on the weekends and I need the help of a technician, it’s far easier for me to walk over to SoHo than to Chelsea.

In the past, I’ve always just waited until Monday morning when I could stop by Tekserve on the way to work, but this weekend I decided to give the so-called “Genius Bar” a shot and I toted my PowerBook over there looking for some resolution to a problem with personal file sharing. On Saturday morning, the wait was longer than I had expected, though still reasonable at about ten minutes, and I had a peppy technician poking around the laptop’s settings before I knew it.

As with most technical support I encounter, there was the customary preliminary questioning to establish that my problem wasn’t something completely obvious and that I had at least a bit more know-how than a typical retail customer, but it wasn’t nearly as patronizing as even the support I get from Apple’s phone support personnel. Before too long, they had identified the problem as a permissions issue and resolved it easily enough, which was terrific even if I got the sense that the technician was almost as surprised as I was that his solution worked. In any event, I was generally pleased; I was in and out of there inside of thirty minutes with my problem solved and having been charged absolutely nothing.