Dear Customers: Don't try to take shortcuts.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

I don't care what the Dell phone support monkey told you. Nope. Not a bit. Dell will only issue us a labor reimbursement for warranty parts that WE order, not parts that YOU get sent to us before even bringing us your machine. Never mind that unless we have a record of having ordered the part, the warehouse will automatically refuse to accept said shipment once it arrives, so it would get sent back anyway.  So if you want us to install the part, you will have to pay labor even though your machine is under warranty.

So yes, you will have to leave your Precious with us for a proper evaluation so we can verify your problem and get the correct parts for the machine ordered. These rules exist for YOUR protection, and will actually create less downtime for you than having somebody who has never seen your machine guessing whats wrong with it and guessing wrong. So quit trying to shortcut procedure and suck it up.

Comments

[freakbarman.livejournal.com]

Oh god I feel your pain. I deal with this all the time. My favorite is when the higher ups ok us to go ahead and do the repair anyways and when they bring us the system it's not a faulty LCD or what not, but a busted one.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Oh, those cracked LCD's and the people who swear they didn't break them. (A single crack across the display that doesn't have a clear point of origin and might just be thermal stress, yeah, maybe. Radial cracks from the edge of the display that look like maybe the vendor crimped the sheet metal a wee bit too tight, possibly. But radial cracks from a clear impact mark in the middle of the display, no fscking way, dude, fess up, you broke it.) And then whine about how expensive the repair will be when it's clear that they're not going to be able to game the system on an accidental damage repair, those are lovely too, especially the female college students. (It's amazing how fast they turn world-class bitchy when crying doesn't work..)

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

For a while, I was in both consumer and service tech support, so I actually got to hear both sides of this sort of thing, and in rare cases, I might actually talk to both the asshat customer and the incredibly patient service tech on the same case. It's a fairly universal truth in computer repair that it will take as long as it takes, and attempts to speed up an already exhaustively optimized process by playing games like this will inevitably slow it down and cost more, because only in extremely rare cases (like customers who are qualified and certified service techs themselves) will the customer actually have a clue which part is actually causing the problem. And there is a veritable mountain of folklore and fantasy surrounding "common knowledge" of "what's causing the problem". If they think it's the hard drive, 90% of the time it will be the logic board, and if they think it's the logic board, it's almost always the power supply. But getting the right answer to that question does require actually looking at the computer and doing empirical diagnostics on it.

(And some of the techs themselves are a bit clueless, the symptom of which is usually throwing the same part at a problem repeatedly even though replacing it doesn't affect the behavior at all. Most of the time, when I ran into that, it was due to the tech not doing the diagnostic procedures right or cutting corners in the process and leaving out critical steps that were tedious but necessary, and stupid bullshit things like not being able to use or read a DMM, etc. The vast majority of those were uncertified, and when my employer finally started cracking down on the trunk slammers, a lot of those problems went away and our customers were a lot happier. :D )