Swimming Electronics

[firewallender.livejournal.com]

Two days after I deployed a IBM ThinkPad T42 to one of our departments, someone spilled a glass of water on it. After cleaning off *most* of the water, what do they do with this moist electronic piece of expensiveness? Try to turn it on of course.

Even better, one of the Vice Presidents brought his brand new Samsung i730 smartphone to dinner with him and accidentally bathed it in a vat of basalmic vinegar and oil. Suffice to say, it no longer works.

This week brings back fond memories of my last job at a Seattle Biotech, where I had to replace the keyboard on a Dell laptop after a lab tech spilled a can of beer into it. I still remember calling Dell's tech support when I realized one of the keyboard screws has been put in at an angle and was completely stripped, irremovable. Dell's suggestion: "Have you tried using a screwdriver?"

"Why no! I've been using my teeth!!"

*sigh*

Comments

[trenthamfamily.livejournal.com]

LOL now I'm picturing a keyboard hanging out of someone's mouth.

[bpcslave.livejournal.com]

Well, I once dropped my mobile phone when I bent over, and it slipped out of my shirt pocket onto a hard floor - the speaker basically stopped working after that, meaning it wouldn't ring. For whatever reason, over a couple of weeks, the speaker slowly came back until it was as good as new.

Later on the day I commented to someone about this fact, I got home, bent over to pick up some mail - and the phone slipped out of the same shirt pocket, into a bowl of salty, rusty water my brother had secreted in the front room, to make iron oxide.

When I fished it out and let it dry - the speaker was back to being broken again. >.

[chaobell]

When I worked at Circuit City, some guy brought in a camcorder two days after he bought it, claiming he'd opened it but hadn't used it and just decided he didn't want it anymore.

The techs found a tape in it. The techs played the tape. The techs watched beautiful footage of the camcorder being dropped into a swimming pool.

No refund was issued. ^_^

[firewallender.livejournal.com]

Hahahahaha!!! Excellent!!!! :)

[sketchydave.livejournal.com]

Oh tell me you played the tape for him! I did a stint at Best Buy and did the same type of thing for returns. We had a TV that faced out towards the store that we tested the DVD players, VCRs, etc on.

Man, I can't believe how badly customers lie. We are techs, we are smarter than you are.

[swwinchester.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that seems to have been pretty much "Unwritten SOP" for the company ... we were known for doing it as well.

My personal favorite was a customer - a very, VERY rude suburban mom the classic 'scream until I get what I want' type. She's complaining that the VCR on her VCR / DVD Combo never works, won't eject tapes, won't rewind ... host of problems - she wants the tape out and the thing replaced. Well, the tape out, that I can do while I figure out what's wrong. I open it up, look down, and there's a d6 wedged behind a button, causing it to constantly receive NOTHING but a fast-forward command. Put unit on counter in front of customer, remove die, hand it to her, eject tape, take it over to that TV, test it fine, hand it back to her. "Nope, not going to exchange it. Works fine. Manual says 'keep out of reach of children' for a reason. Have a good day."

[sketchydave.livejournal.com]

I think that the all the Big Box stores should print the following definition in big bold letters:

fraud

n 1: intentional deception resulting in injury to another person 2: a person who makes deceitful pretenses [syn: imposter, impostor, pretender, fake, faker, sham, shammer, pseudo, pseud, role player] 3: something intended to deceive; deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage [syn: fraudulence, dupery, hoax, humbug, put-on]

It serves as a message to the customers and the salespeople. Techs get stuck in the middle because we don't want to rip anyone off nor do we want to be ripped off ourselves.

[swwinchester.livejournal.com]

I personally agree with you 110%. However, this customer was not, in fact, a fruad. She had a legitimate failure of the unit to function, and she was not certain what caused the failure - she just knew it wasn't working anymore. She wanted it replaced since she is apparently a 'Watch Children By Plopping In Front Of TV With VHS Of Barney Going' kind of parent, and the idea of us having to send it out for repair would have demanded her upping her Zoloft dose to deal with her little hell-raisers.

To be honest, however - it should not just be in the Big Box stores. I feel that any retail environment should have that definition posted in clear view of the returns counter / tech counter - from Why-Mart to Magnolia Hi-Fi.

[klytus.livejournal.com]

If a screw-head sits above or near-enough to the surface, a nice pair of wire-cutters can be used to grip the screw-head and dig in ennough so that you can turn it and remove it. This trick saved my ass I don't know how many times when I did on-site service calls on HP Printers.