Apple Cares

I had bought a 20GB refurbished ipod for $100 in December; a pretty good deal, the only glitch was that it was ‘refurbished‘. Some people advised me against it but anyway I went ahead and bought it because the warranty period was the same as that of a new one.
About a month back, I started having problems with it. Some songs won’t play or pause or stop in-between. Finally around two weeks back, it just stopped working. I tried resetting, restoring, reinstalling whatever I could but eventually I gave up. On start up, it was showing an icon suggesting hardware failure. I thought I should have listened to the people advising me against a refurbished ipod. My only faith was in the warranty. So I booked an appointment with the genius bar of an apple store in downtown. You can do it from apple.com/retail for an appointment on the same day. Advanced booking can be done only by procare members. I arrived for the appointment 2 minutes late. Luckily, the lady in front had taken more than the stipulated time and I didn’t have to miss my turn. I went to the ipod bar, told about my problem and the person immediately confirmed that it was a hardware failure. He checked whether I was within warranty period (from their database, no need to carry your proof unless there is a mistake in their database) and replaced my ipod with a functioning one. The whole process took less than 5 minutes. I am impressed with the customer care of apple.