I must first tell you the back story before I get to what happened today.
Here is the quick version of the back story: Four or five months ago I was talking with my boss about random stuff and I happened to ask her about her "old" iPod. (it had died on her and instead of getting it fixed she just bought a new one) She told me that she never got around to getting it fixed and it was just sitting on a shelf in her house. Then she said that I could have it if I wanted. Thinking that it might (if I was lucky) still be under warranty, I took it home. When I charged it up, IT WORKED! I was pretty excited to say the least. The only down side was that she doesn't take very good care of her stuff so it was very scratched and had been dropped several times, so there was no promise as to how long this thing would last. Until recently it worked without a hitch. Lately it had been freezing up on me and doing a few other weird things. So I tried to reset it on my computer last weekend and it did something very odd. When I cleared it off, it told me that I basically had a 23 gig iPod , when in fact it was a 60 gig. I tried to restore it several times but to no avail...
Today, on my way home from work, I stopped by the trusty old Apple store. Since it was way out of warranty I thought there was nothing they could do, but I figured I might as well give it a shot. I walked right up to the help desk and was asked what kind of issues I was having. I told the guy, and he seemed perplexed. He took my iPod to the back to plug it in and see if there was anything he could do. About 10 minutes later he came back out. He told me that he had never seen this problem before and that he was going to replace my iPod for free. Yep, you read that right, FREE! I must remind you that it was at least 6 months out of warranty. I guess he was just having a good day, but in about 10 more minutes, he re-emerged from the back with a "new" (actually it was refurbished, but you would never know it wasn't new) iPod for me. No questions asked. All in all, I spent about 30 minutes in the Apple store, and all I did was tell them my problem and they fixed it without a single question.
Needless to say, I was pretty excited to get my new, scratch free, iPod. Just another reason I really like Mac, great customer service...