ZDNet : Apple really is becoming Microsoft...

"I found myself at the not-too-local Apple store this morning, taking my 19 year old daughter to get her iPhone 3GS serviced. She had been on vacation last week and her 9 month old phone suddenly decided that the battery would last for only an hour or two, at best. She called me and I told her to just make an appointment at the local Apple store (less than 20 minutes from where she was vacationing) and that they should swap her phone for a refurb again (her first phone suffered a major failure less than two weeks after she received it).
She handed her phone to the Genius at the Apple Bar and after running diagnostics, they reset the phone to factory defaults and upgraded her to the latest dot release of iOS 4 and told her the problem was solved. If it happened again, she should go to any Apple store and they would happily replace the phone.
Unfortunately, on the 20 minute car ride back to the hotel from the Apple Store, the phone lost 15% of its indicated power, so the problem clearly wasn’t solved." ~ David Chernicoff

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-really-is-becoming-microsoft/38162?tag=nl.e539

Well the tag line might be a little bit overzealous, this is a problem for people. It seems that some companies MS, Apple, BK, McD's, and others, don't train their employees as well as they should. Now in some cases they just don't understand or get it but in many it is a simple lack in training and customer service. There are people out there who should not be in that arena, we have all met someone like this and are probably picturing them right now. That said, good customer service skills to not a technology expert make. These skills help quite a bit, but you need the training and knowledge to back this up. IT could just be faulty hardware, or gasp.... a "ghost" in the machine.