IMac Heartbreak: Fear & Worry For My Family

Question

This is a post I wrote in my blog tonight. I don't know where else to turn. Maybe if I post this here, someone @ Apple will read it and maybe something can turn around.
POST BEGINS HERE ---------
I must start at the beginning, for those of you who have not been following my reported travails in this situation through my Facebook and Twitter posts.
Almost two months ago, electricity surged through my building and killed my iMac. I don’t know what happened. I had two other laptops on, and none of them experienced the same problem. Bottom line, my computer that had never given me trouble previously, suddenly went AWOL. And has remained decidedly so ever since.
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I boxed it up the next day, and had to endure the humiliation of having my mother pay to send it back to California, where my dear friend took it into Apple for repair or replacement.
By the time it got there--admittedly a while after I sent it--it was out of warrantee. Apple agreed to honour the warrantee, because when it arrived in California, my friend was travelling and it could not be brought in time. It was only a week or so out of warrantee in any case.
Apple opted not to replace it, but instead ordered a new logic board with the integrated upgraded NVidia GeForce card I ordered with the machine, a new power management unit and a new screen.
They boxed it up, my friend collected it and sent it back to me.
By this time, it had been gone for almost six weeks.
My finances were decimated by this. I needed the machine to work to capacity, and neither of the two laptops here are more than web browsing machines. None can power the tool kit that I use to do what it is I do every day.
I lost both my main contracts, had to turn down a couple projects because I knew I couldn’t do them justice, and basically by this point, when it got back from California, I was dead broke and living off of the charity of friends and my family.
Did I mention I had to pay almost $1000BDS to get it to and from California? Adding to the state I was in?
Let me describe it to you. I’ve been going hungry so my child could eat. We went without enough food for weeks while this machine was being repaired. My electricity was on the verge of being disconnected, my Internet access WAS disconnected, and my landlord had to wait weeks for me to collect enough small amounts to pay my rent. My mother and 89 year old grandmother paid my son’s school fees so I could keep him in school, and well I cried a lot at my own wretchedness.
I am crying as I type this, because this story is so not over.
So four Wednesdays ago, my computer gets back from California, and thankful to all I consider holy, I eagerly unpacked it, ready to climb my way out of my situation the way I always do, with hard, hard, hard, hard work.
I booted up, and my computer began to behave erratically. Blue screen of death, grey screen hangs, black outs, weird vertical lines. I fought with it for days, tried every trick in my arsenal, combed every useful forum I knew looking for ways to solve what was going on.
In the end I admitted defeat, called Apple and burned up some SkypeOut minutes, they walked me through everything they could think of, and yet it still did not work. I followed up on a lead, and called in the best Apple Support guy on the island, who walked me through some stuff, suggested I swap the RAM.
In this experience, I can only say that my faith and the unbelievable kindness that I am a beneficiary of on a regular enough basis to tell you I know that I am a charmed child, despite the horrors of this story.
A friend of mine, BOUGHT me new memory, since I didn’t have a crumb, and by this time was surviving on what my mother could siphon from her larder, and I had been going days without eating more than crackers.
He brought them for me, I installed them, and it improved the performance but did not solve the problem.
The Apple Support guy came out, re-installed the OS from scratch, and while he was beginning to work with the machine, the weird glitches and ticks continued.
He declared this a hardware problem, and that there was nothing more he could do for me.
After calling up Apple again, they said the repair had a 90-day warrantee, and the parts a one-year warrantee, so if I could just find the money (out of my *** right) to get it the closest Apple Repair Centre, they would fix it.
It took me almost a week to scrape enough money together to send it to F1 Connect in Trinidad. Off it went. And there it’s been up to the point i am typing this.
The did all kind of diagnostics and that alone took a few days, and they declared it to be a fault in the logic board. That was TWO Fridays ago.
Last week was a two day week, as there were three public holidays, but the replacement logic board was ordered last Wednesday. It arrived yesterday, was installed yesterday, and guess what?
My machine is still behaving strangely, the screen is now apparently showing dark and they’ve ordered a new one. They're also testing it again to see if the problem is rectified, but the guy said it's the worst machine his shop has every seen, and there is no rhyme or reason to these issues.
So, wait! WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT a minute!
Right now as I type this, more parts have gone into this computer than what it was orginally worth, and for the last two months my child and I have been struggling to survive while all this has been going on, and they STILL don’t have a clue what’s going on with it.
The thing that bothers me the most, is the Apple Store in California. How could they gut out this machine and pretty much replace every component of any value in it, and not even check to see that it was WORKING properly before they sent it back? Does that make sense to you?
I feel a level of hysteria that it is only the sheer force of my considerable will is battling down.
Not because this has been inconvenient. It has certainly been that, but I am still in that hard place. Struggling to keep my child fed and in school and the roof over our heads, and my ability to do that is entirely bound up with the iMac now in Trinidad.
I feel completely powerless, and I don’t know who to reach out to to ask for help. I need to work. I don’t want a hand out, I just want to work. I need my computer to work.
Why can’t Apple just send me a new computer?
It’s not like I don’t evangelise. Ask anyone who has met me in the last 15 years if I waste an opportunity to rave about Apple and the Macintosh. I sold the first iMac ever in Barbados in 1998. The iMac currently breaking my heart is my seventh Apple computer. And I will buy Apple again. I will always buy Apple. I am one of those die-hard Apple brain-washed folks people sneer at, don’t get, but who will preach the Mac Gospel as long as Apple keeps producing beautiful operating systems.
Even after this, I will never shift from my Macintosh environment to any other type of OS. My life’s work is bound up with Apple technology and the Mac Os platform. I feel no shame or remorse whatsoever in buying that iMac.
But this is breaking my heart. All I can do is cry and cry, because the one thing I want to do is work and earn enough to keep my little boat with me and my little boy in it afloat, and for two months I’ve not really been able to do that.
So I face losing my apartment now, and am desperately  trying to figure out how to keep my boy at school. We’re getting lower and lower on food supplies again. I have been hanging on and hanging on hoping the computer would return by next week. Since this does not seem likely, I face losing what little project work I’ve been holding on (and off on) because a client will only be patient with your drama just so long, and then what?
What happens to my life in two weeks? I really don’t know what to say. I just have faith that something can and will turn around for me.
At this point, I think Apple should just send me a new computer, because I cannot see how pouring more parts worth more than the machine, is productive or efficient. Neither do I think I can sustain what is shaping up to be another three week wait. I am just barely managing my panic thinking about it.
So this is me... in a proper righteous fret, but trying really hard not to let this newest delay... do what? Do what? Depress me, frighten me, worry me? I am already doing that. I am a single mother and not being able to support us is the thing that frightens and scares me most in life. What I won’t let it do is destroy my faith in myself, or in Apple.
I just want a machine I can work on. Really work on. I just want to get back to work.

Answer 1

BCB... do you have any idea what it's like to be a single mother, a tech person, working and living in this country? You don't sound like you do. You cannot know intimately my circumstances beyond what I am sharing here in an effort to find a SOLUTION and more importantly guidance. if you can offer neither, then kindly reserve either comment or judgement of my life based on your yardstick.
I am a woman in the world with much intellectual capital in a country that has no respect for it. How I have had to make my way, is the way that I must make. It has kept me alive, and my child alive. I work very, very, very hard. I produce good work. I am not looking for a handout, I want to work. Right now I cannot work to any capacity because of this. My situation does not provide nice comfortable buffers you may live with. I really am part of those faceless masses of women out there in the world who have to use what wits they have to live by and provide for themselves and their own.
Don't judge me. I don't steal, I don't whore and I maintain my integrity.
1) My computer was not unprotected. And three other machines in the house did not fail. All are connected to the same power supply.
2) Apple DID agree to honour the warrantee, not once but twice, so have accepted some responsibility or at least some willingness to extend their service to cover me. And why not, karmically it benefits them to help small fries like me. I am part of the force of tech people who have single-handedly convinced as many of my peers as possible to buy and consume Apple products wherever possible.
3) The problems I have been reporting with the iMac are rife throughout these SAME forums and others. I found ample evidence of this during my searches for a potential solution. I cannot say that lightning was the cause of the problem. Only lightning struck my building and shortly thereafter my problems began. Maybe they're coincidental... maybe not. My point remains.
4) iMac was REPAIRED and sent back NOT WORKING. Sent back under warrantee for parts and repairs, parts have been replaced and is still not working. Dude... come on! If the machine came back and the parts installed were defective, then they're under warrantee. So don't say I don't have a valid claim for service. Apple is known to help people like me in these situations.