Apple Customer service

Apple customer service is outstanding... Seriously, more companies should look at the way these guys treat their customers, they are always polite, helpful, and fix the problem.

I turned on my iMac this morning only to find the blue screen of death starring at me, I tried restarting and some basic trouble shooting but nothing happened. I called Apple care and the service tech walked me through several steps to try and correct the problem. Now the blue screen was gone and now there was a login issue. I'd log in and it would loop to the blue screen and go back to the login. The tech said he was going to place me on hold to research this and be back in a moment. Right about now I'm getting pretty nervous because  it has been quite some time since I've backed up my data to and external hard drive. All of our high definition video footage is safely put on hard drives and in a media safe but there are 17, 500 images are on this iMac. Approximately 15,000 of these images are backed up but the rest....
(The website was never in jeopardy, it's backed up on two hard drives and runs in a different computer, my work horse, the Mac Pro).

The tech came back and said that he is going to transfer me to a senior tech to help me with my issue, more attempts were made to resolve the problem but with no avail, the next step was to reinstall the operating system. He said that should do it but gave me his contact information just in case. So now after about two hours on the phone with technical support, about another hour was need to install the Mac OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.4. Not that big of a deal but still time consuming. Once it was all installed, yep, you guessed it, same problem, the login loop... Now I'm becoming more concerned about the possibility of something drastically wrong. I called the senior technician back and got his voice mail, left my info and waited for his call. Any guesses how long I had to wait? Under five minutes!! More companies should have customer service like these guys! He was very surprised that the reinstall didn't fix it but had several more possible solutions. About 20 minutes later, problem solved all data retrieved : )

Turns out it was a corrupt application that caused the login loop, which application was it? I'm not sure we removed all except for iPhoto, iTunes, mail, and the address book. I am so happy that I didn't loose my pictures and very thankful for all the help from Apple's customer services and the technical support team.

The moral of this rambling story, back up your data...