Reinventing Customer Service

I recently had the opportunity to experience a level of customer service that really took me by surprise when a company tried to actually make things right. I have previously posted about Apple 1st generation hardware woes and while they were legitimate claims of defects, attempts to get them fixed not on my own dime served fruitless for over a year. But then something very very cool happened on a last attempt to reach out to Apple about the obvious issues that I was having with the hardware.

Just as recap:
A firmware update to my optical drive effectively broke it (wouldn't even read OS disc)
And there was discoloration in tandem with an unprovoked crack in the top casing.

Now while the top casing did suck it was something I could live with (if I had to) but the firmware breaking my optical drive (Superdrive 2.1 firwmare on a Matshita UJ-857 drive) really irked me. Of course there is an argument for just buying an external optical and going from there. However I didn't break my machine, and it was a laptop. Who wants to lug around a giant external optical when going somewhere? I know that I sure don't want to.
So how did things go wrong, and what did I do in order to get the ball rolling in a helpful direction? Well first of call, calling Apple's support lines is of very minimal help when you are "a tech person" and have already tried the usual steps of reseting things to default. You can't blame the techs on the phone because most consumers calling in (especially macs) are probably not going to know pretty specific reasons as to why the computer is effed.
The largest obstacle for the regular Apple phone tech's was that this was not a "documented problem" when all over their own discussion boards as well as various forums there are literally thousands of people who were effected by this firmware collision.
So here is what worked for me, and hopefully if you have a similar situation you will have the same type of response from Apple. First of all I e-mailed a pretty "to the point" letter to the following three e-mail addresses: steve@mac.com, sjobs@apple.com, sjobs@mac.com While these are "Steve Jobs e-mails" we all know he probably has absolutely nothing to do with these addresses and it's just an intercept point for a few staff in Cupertino to catch the really annoyed customers. I honestly didn't expect any reply as I felt that I had exhausted all of my avenues of potentially getting my issues resolved, but within 2 business days I got a nice call from a "Ken Bell" who gave me a direct phone number to reach him at, discussed my situation and had me talking to a real Tech the same day. After receiving my Logs and realizing that it was a legitimate issue from Apple, they promptly had a box sent to my door, and with 1 day shipping each way I had my computer back all fixed within 3 business days.
Being a college student and only owning this one Macbook and no other computer, time was critical when getting it repaired and Apple certainly delivered.
In addition to the new Superdrive (as you couldn't just flash it back to the previous firmware) they also replaced my top case for discoloration!
I was very pleased to know that if you push hard enough a company like this will fix a wrong doing even when the computer is out of warranty. While it is unfortunate that I know there are a lot of customers who gave up on the phone lines and went without a fix. However if you have the same problem try to recreate my steps and see if you have similar success!