Service. Or lack thereof.

You might have noticed a minor interruption in content this last month or so. Well, you see, my laptop developed a fault some time back. Problem with the screen – couldn’t see anything but flickering static when online. Since I bought the thing from a leading retailer I’ve been forking out money each month for a sort of insurance thing where they would fix anything or replace that which proved unfixable.

So, off I pop to hand the thing over. Turns out it’ll take nine days before I get it back. That’s quite a bit longer than expected, but maybe they’re busy. I hand it over and leave, muttering a little under my breath.

Nine Internet-free days go by. By now the number of funny cat pictures I’ve missed must be astronomical. The previous day (that is, after eight days), they figured out that the laptop is still under the manufacturer’s warranty so they need to return it to them to fix –they can’t touch it. Eight days. To figure that out. So that’s another week to wait. And the monthly payment turns out to be wasted money because we would’ve got this anyway due to it still being covered by the manufacturer.

We wait another week, through gritted teeth. We head on in. It was picked up yesterday. So once they knew it needed returning to the manufacturer it took six days to arrange a pick up. So that’s 14 days so far, and now they’re telling me it shouldn’t be more than another five in a tone that suggests I’m expected to be impressed by this. The pleasant person behind the counter telling us this didn’t seem to understand why we found this surprising and frustrating. Where in the world would this be considered decent service?

We finally get the laptop back almost three weeks after bringing it in. We’ve learnt a few things in that time. We’ve learnt that we are cancelling the payment we’re currently making in case anything goes wrong. As the laptop is junk anyway, we’ll be glad of an excuse to get a new one. And we learnt that there is a major retailer of electronic goods and services that will have to manage without any more of our money. Not that that’s likely to bother them much, but even a minor protest is still a protest.