The Design and Implementation of laffer1

So I finally got a call from the Apple store yesterday to pick up my iMac.  I was told 5-7 days if they had to order a hard drive.  I was expecting them to replace the hard drive.  I get there, and they have not replaced the hard drive.  They used a third party program to partition the disk and some how got 10.5 on it.  They claimed it was good to go.   I was a bit skeptical because I know how to work on a Mac myself and if it was indeed just a simply formatting problem I would have felt very stupid.  At 75 dollars, I felt a bit ripped off anyway.  I mean, they just formatted the drive and put 10.5 on it.  Why did it take 6 days to do that?  

I brought the iMac home.  It did boot into 10.5.8 and run through the setup wizard.  I was a bit annoyed already because I told the guy I had snow leopard.  My time machine backup is for snow leopard!  I noticed the drive seemed slow, but it did get on the internet and things appeared to work.  I rebooted onto snow leopard media to install snow leopard.  It failed.  I then tried to reboot and format the drive.  That failed with an IO error!  I got a bit pissed and did a format while zeroing the drive and went to bed.  That actually completed.  I started the 10.6 install and it failed after about 2 minutes.  It's obvious that my iMac is not functioning correctly.  I would assume it was a compatibility problem with 10.6 except that it worked fine since release day and the apple store employee booted 10.6 on it at the store in front of me the day I brought it in.  So either there is a massive bug in snow leopard or my hard drive is failing.  I'm assuming the latter.  

Thus apple ripped me off for 75 bucks and I'll have to rip the damn thing apart myself which I wanted to avoid.  Lesson learned: Apple store can't fix macs.  I just wonder what totally clueless people do with these situations.  I lost a week of time with my iMac and i have to go look for suction cups and torx screwdrivers today plus buy a hard drive.  I'm not happy.  

Of course we bought a new mac at the store yesterday for caryn.  She's upgrading her laptop to a new MBP.  I feel annoyed that we gave them a sale.