Speaking of Dell's recent fall from grace (well, okay, it was more of a dainty stumble), wouldja believe that there almost seems to be some sort of actual correlation between a computer company's customer satisfaction levels and the performance of its stock? We know, it's weird-- it's almost like Wall Street is doing something logical for once. When the possibility occurred to us, we admit we had to lie down for a while until the feelings of dizziness passed. Then we ate an entire one-pound bag of Twizzlers and everything was okay again.

But leaving aside the miraculous restorative powers of a simple strawberry-flavored twisty confection, check this out: Bloomberg reports that the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index ranks Dell a 74, which represents a 6.3 percent drop from its year-ago score of 79, and the lowest score Dell's received since 1998. Claes Fornell, head of the National Quality Research Center which assembles the index based on a poll of 80,000 consumers, describes Dell's decline as "dramatic" and blames "call center problems, including long wait times and difficulty with consumers getting their questions answered." (It was probably also a bad move on Dell's part to replace all of its call center staff with talkative parrots and small children wielding See 'n' Say Farmer Says toys, but did they listen when we warned them? Nnnnoooooo...) Claes also notes that "consumers are also questioning the reliability of their PCs." Whuh-oh, sounds like trouble in paradise; when his customers start focusing on reliability, it's time for Mike Dell to flee for the hills.

Apple, meanwhile, continues to top the charts with its score of 81-- the highest score in the index, unchanged from last year, and still Apple's best result in the index's 11-year history. This comes as no particular surprise to us, seeing as our own latest experience with Apple's customer service is progressing smoothly; the Genius-on-duty at the Apple Store Northshore Monday night believed us when we told him that our iPod's hold switch was flaky, even though we couldn't demonstrate it in front of him. He put us down for a free warranty replacement with zero hassle. Unfortunately, due to a recent run on replacement iPods, we have to wait until next week to make the swap, but since our iPod is merely sick and not actually dead, that barely inconveniences us at all. We couldn't ask for much more. Well, maybe a cocktail. And a pony. But all in all, we were pretty satisfied with what we got.

Now, here's the freaky part: Apple, whose customer satisfaction score tops the industry, has seen its stock price balloon 48 percent this year already. Dell, meanwhile, whose score dropped significantly since last year, also happens to be down 13 percent in the stock market in 2005. It all actually makes sense. Spooky, isn't it? Alert the media!