On Monday, I offered an initial recap of an incident where, while finishing my taxes and setting up a PowerBook G3 for my grandmother and going to answer the phone, I accidentally tripped over a power cord and knocked half a Corona into the keyboard of my MacBook laptop.

A few days later, when I felt the unit had been sufficiently dried out, I booted it and found that the space bar was now stuck.

Space bars are kind of necessary.

Not the most graceful thing I've ever done and the journey to the Apple Store wound up with them citing a flat US$755 repair bill for non-warranty spill damage.

Biting the bullet, I signed the agreement and settled back into my own life. When Apple called and left a message on my answering machine that the MacBook had been repaired, I took this as a good thing and made a mental note to swing by.

Yesterday afternoon, I walked into my local Apple store, waited behind the crowd at the Genius Bar to pick my laptop up and was approached by a sales associate, who asked if she could help. I explained that I was there to pick up my repaired laptop and what had happened with the spill. She smiled, mentioned that she'd accidentally had a can of hairspray leak into her Blackberry while it was in her luggage, gave me a friendly chuck on the shoulder and pulled a Genius Bar worker aside to have him grab my MacBook from the back.

Not a bad thing and you tend to feel decent about the people helping you.

It was then that the Genius Bar employee pulled out the repaired MacBook from the back, had me look over the repairs on the printed invoice, cited that the hard drive had been replaced, the RAM reseated, some cabling settled back into place, the top case replaced and everything was good to go.

He kept the MacBook closed the whole time while he began to ask me for my credit card.

It was then that I opened the MacBook open, turned it on and expected to have to log in to my user account.

All I saw was the Leopard setup screen.

I then asked what had happened to my old data.

The Genius Bar employee looked at me and explained that the hard drive had been replaced, a new drive was in there and in Tier 4 cases such as these, data backup would have qualified as another service and "we probably should have mentioned that..."

It was then that my stomach basically sank through my shoes.

All my files, my financial data, notes, pictures, e-mail, songs, the whole shebang was now dead and gone.

When I last booted the MacBook, the hard drive was in reasonably good shape with the drive booting promptly and the major problem being that the space bar now seemed permanently depressed in the down position.

That was it and the data seemed more than recoverable when I handed it over.

I wasn't sure what to do at this point. Screaming to speak to the manager wasn't going to solve anything and certainly wouldn't bring the data back. Insulting the uber-hip guy giving me the bad news at the Genius Bar wasn't going to do anything and my argument that an almost US$800 bill should have included some form of data recovery had gone nowhere.

It was here that I signed the invoice, gathered my things and walked out while wondering what data to port over from my Mac Pro back home.

It shouldn't have been this way.

I'll admit I made a mistake on my end and accidentally soaking your MacBook in beery goodness wasn't a good start. Still, it's this sort of arrogance where an Apple employee explains why no one tried to recover your data by telling you that "the tech guys exterminate with extreme prejudice" that doesn't cover anything.

While extreme prejudice sounds cool, Marlon Brando was already killed with a large, agrarian farm implement in "Apocalypse Now" and that has nothing to do with my MacBook or the data on it.

At no point did an Apple employee cite that data recovery would qualify as an extra charge and the general idea of a flat rate is this: "you made a mistake, it's not covered by your AppleCare, but we'll perform the services necessary to get your computer back to the way it functioned before."

And I'd like to have thought that included recovering my data, especially if the evidence pointed to the data being recoverable.

In the time I've worked on Macs for friends and clients, I've learned that a hard drive's data is paramount to everything. If a server dies, there needs to be a backup of some sort. If a laptop dies, the best thing to do is find out how to cleanly pull the hard drive out, then mount it in an external carrier and copy every piece of data, even if it takes all night and you wind up nursing the files over, one file or folder at a time. If the process crashes the other computer or you become all too familiar with DiskWarrior or Drive Genius while trying to make the drive mountable again, then that's the price of trying to do the right thing for your client and why you're drawing a salary in the first place.

My point is this: If I mentioned that even an attempt at data recovery wasn't standard practice for my clients, they would string me up by my tonsils.

And rightfully so.

So, what's next? Not much aside from using the day to restore data and get my MacBook back together. I shouldn't have to do this, someone should have offered the option and/or explained the specifics of what a Tier 4 spill repair would entail and Apple needs to review this policy, especially if the standard version of it makes no effort whatsoever to recover a client's data and Genius Bar employees make no effort to explain the difference.

The irrelevant points: I've stuck with Apple and loved their products for years. I'm in that store about twice a week and almost expect them to have a cot and a cup of hot cocoa waiting for me after a long day. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars with that location over the years.

The relevant point: Do a better job.

That being said, I'm only going to accidentally spill the finest Evian into my computer. I mean, come on, I've learned my lesson here.