A Break In The Horror

There is still justice, albeit on a tiny scale.

Some may have followed with varying interest my tales of computer repair woe. My first hard drive and logic board had problems and I had gone through a long methodical process of isolating the problem before calling the Warranty Service.

Well, by gobbs, all's well that ends well -- I got a new logic board, AND a new hard drive that's twice as big as the first, AND I got to humiliate an uppity Pink TO THE MAX, all for my measly $250 3-year warranty.

This Mac G-4's logic board had failed in several areas subsequent to the original drive's breakdowm. 15 months after purchase. The $200 warranty on my PREVIOUS Mac ended up paying for two replacement monitors and a whole replacement Power Mac 7500.

Obviously, it's a good idea to get the extra warranty if you buy Apple computers. Perhaps that's true of any computer. I dunno.

Anyway, the Service Warranty people in Tennessee never gave me any hassle. Hardly. They were thoroughly polite and seemed knowledgeable. Mostly. And the ONE repair guy at the LOCAL authorized repair place, the place that would do the actual repair or replacement, HE was real nice, and PAID ATTENTION when I detailed to him what I knew.

But the GOOD repairman, like me, went on vacation! When I returned and fetched my Mac, I found that, though the logic board had been replaced, the Bad Repairman had left in the original bad hard drive. I called the repair place but only the BAD repairman was there. He said they would NOT replace the drive because "It boots up fine and passed the official Apple repair CD-R test. PERIOD." I said, "But, like I said, it only reads at 400k/sec. It passes all the software and bad block tests and it writes at 20,000k/sec but it READS WAY TOO SLOW. How fast did your official Apple repair CD-R say it was reading?" "OUR TEST DOESN'T GIVE THAT INFORMATION, IT ONLY SAYS IF IT PASSES! IT PASSED! IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THAT, CALL THE WARRANTY SERVICE PEOPLE AGAIN AND COMPLAIN!"

And all this, after I voluntarily drove the deck out to their remote location to help them make sure everything was done right the first time. Despite their ALL-WRONG directions to their industrial strip mall.

I did talk to the Warranty place again. At LENGTH. And this morning -- AHAHAHAHAHA!! -- the Bad Repairman himself had to drive WAY out here to our compound to PERSONALLY hand me a brand new replacement hard drive in return for the fucked up one that HE DIDN'T BELIEVE ME about.

And guess what? They didn't HAVE any more *10* gig ATA hard drives in stock!! Boo hoo! Instead they had to give me a TWENTY gig drive!! WHAT A FUCKING SHAME!!!!

Service Warranty had to give me over $900 worth of replacement gear AND 10 extra gigs for my $250 warranty on a $1500 computer.

Wait a minute, what am I crowing about. I still ended up paying $1750 for a computer.

BOY does it run now, though! There's a 60 gig Firewire drive for Hour of Slack and video editing, 20 gb interior for system and fancy schmancy multimedia programs, and now another 20 gb that I think I'll use JUST for my ever-growing copy of SubSITE. Then I'll start pouring in the old stacked up a.b.s. artwork until it's FULL TO BURSTING!! UH UH UH

At first the Service Warranty people BALKED at giving me a replacement hard drive when I called them a second time and told them that the Bad Repairman hadn't done his job and was full of shit. The customer service girl consulted offline with her boss and at first she conveyed to me that "We can't replace that drive just because it runs slow -- it will have to be crashing repeatedly when it is run through the official tests."

I politely asked her to repeat what she had just told me, although I knew exactly what she was saying. As she repeated it I could tell she knew I was getting screwed. I then patiently explained to her that although the drive might pass certain tests, Adaptec's TimeDrive test repeatedly diagnosed the problem very specifically; the drive was completely unusable for anything but text editing due to its slow read speed of 400 to 500 kb/s, and that if they thought it worked fine, then they shouldn't mind proving it by trading drives with me for a little while. Also I suggested that if they didn't replace the $250 drive, which was probably what killed the much more expensive logic board, they'd end up having to replace yet another logic board. She saw my point -- she knew it already, but I was giving her a concise script to take back to her boss. Lo and behold, the unseen boss relented and they agreed to service my deck. The customer service girl was audibly glad to be able to tell me that, because she knew her boss had been trying to use a loophole. I had given her a way to let her boss know that *I* knew it was loophole abuse.

I could have taken their "no" for an answer, and been a chump, or I could have blown my top and sounded like a crazy man, which I came close to doing with the Bad Repairman when he informed me of his Catch 22, which would have PROLONGED the whole process by bringing LAWYERS into it... but instead, like a SUBGENIUS, I successfully applied the simple virtues of PATIENCE -- PERSISTENCE -- and MIND CONTROL to hypnotize these Pinks into doing my bidding... smooth-talking them into agreeing that helping me had been their idea all along. Which, according to the warranty document, it was.

I am glad to have something small to brag pridefuly about, in these dark days.

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Original file name: A Break In the Horror - converted on Monday, 21 July 2003, 13:44