skepticism as a skill

how much do you trust people?
...

Recently, I've visited an Apple Store after having trouble resizing a partition of recently purchased Macbook Air.
Way I figured, booting into Recovery and using Disk Utility to resize the main partition fails, when it tried to unmount the volume, since it's in use. Makes no sense to me as to why, since that's the point of Recovery mode - to be independent from installed OS - but whatever. All I needed is a USB Recovery, which is shipped with every Mac.. Well, not any more, as it turns out. "As of Mountain Lion, new Macs do not ship with USB based Recovery, instead - it's build-in", I was told by one of the store specialists, after greeter failed to understand what it is I want [recovery usb drive]. Confirming the experience I've described, store specialist booted into Recovery mode and withdrawn himself after seeing the unmount error message, directing me to Genius Bar. There, I've inquired about creating my own USB based recovery drive, erroneously assuming I need to get "OS X Mountain Lion" via Apple Store for $19.99. Naturally, I was annoyed about having to pay anything for the software I already own, asking the Genius Bar host to confirm my assumption. With a straight face he told me that if I want "that feature", I have to pay. Granted, $20 is not much, but feels wrong when you just spend a pinch under two grand on a top of the line laptop. Bringing that point up didn't help: "It's build-in, if you want it, you have to buy it", was the response. Realizing this is going nowhere, I've stormed out.
Few minutes later, I've landed on Apple Support Page, providing download to OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0, which "lets you create OS X Recovery on an external drive", with following requirements:

• A Mac running OS X with an existing Recovery HD
• An external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space

Why did I even go to the Apple Store? A colleague, who is a former Apple Store Genius, suggested stoping by and talking to someone there. I'd get an answer to my question in no time.

how much do I trust people?
let's just say.. I'm a sceptic.. and, personally, this is an important skill to have.