I was on an outing with my family to a park in another city. While we were there, one of the kids found an Apple iPod Touch 2G (32GB) on the ground. The only thing wrong with it was a shattered screen, which can be fixed (although easily OR cheaply but not both). In fact, it still had some life left on the battery, so it can't have been there for very long.

Well, this is not a cheap toy and the right thing to do would be to get it back to its owner if possible. I went online at Apple and discovered the serial number had been registered just last November.

"Great!", I thought, "Apple has the customer information on record. I can take it to the nearest Apple store and ask them to get the device back to the owner, right?"

I bet you can guess what the answer was.  I wasn't asking them to give me the customer's information. I thought the store manager would take the device, look up the owner, and get it back to them. After all it had been registered. The customer's physical or email address must be somewhere in the system.

Well, if it is, this store manager apparently could not access it. But he did offer to either fix the screen for $120 or give us a percentage off on a new one in trade for the old device (which he already knew wasn't even ours). As far as the Apple Store was concerned, this $300 device was not worth trying to find the owner.

So nice to know they care about each and every customer. Especially existing ones.

Unfortunately, Apple is not alone in this type of attitude. I'm sure there are countless companies who collect customer information in one way or another, as a warranty registration, transaction data, or other what-not. And that data cannot be accessed except by the ... warranty department, billing deparment, sales department...whatever department collected the information in the first place.

This is called siloing and it is a major cause of customer service dysfunction. When information is not shared but bits of it parcelled out to different departments who then guard it jealously, it becomes useless for the business. Here I am trying to be a Good Samaritan, not even asking for the information myself but simply thinking Apple could look up the customer by the registration number (seeing as they are a high tech company with lots of software available to them) and kindly send this expensive device back to the owner. A simple use of recorded information. And they can't.

This does not especially make me anxious to become an Apple customer. I wonder how much of a discount would be offered to someone who brought in my (hypothetically) lost iPad to become one of their customers instead of taking care of one they already had.

BTW, if you have lost your Apple iPod Touch 2G (32GB), I will be happy to return it to you if you can prove ownership by sending me the serial number. It was found in Garland, TX.