netnomad’s blog & grill

With all the bashing I engage in of “extended service agreements” at consumer electronics stores, I thought it only fair to play the other side of the record.

I play an online game with a friend of mine named Jim who is a long-haul trucker in the United States. He games over a cellular internet connection on an HP laptop he purchased on eBay. The original buyer had obtained a (transferable) service agreement from Circuit City when they originally purchased the unit from them. This poor laptop has been in the cab of his truck for years and has been subjected to the intense “shakin’ up” that only a transport truck can provide, and recently began to manifest this.

The story below is his unedited account, as cut/pasted from my guild’s forums. These are his words, not mine. So put the censoring stick down.

I have mentioned recently my notebook woes. The screen was developing funky pixel lines in it, slowly deteriorating to where it was getting too distracting to play on (19 lines at last count). I hadn’t gotten a lot of positive feedback with Circuit City’s service system, City Advantage, as the warranty needed to be transferred from the original buyer to myself. So I finally got off my butt and went into CC to get the notebook turned in and suffer through a few weeks (probably a couple months) of computerless, gameless hell on the road. After going to the customer service counter and speaking with the young lady a few minutes, she said “Well, we can’t take this particular model in for service…” (so now I’m waiting for the F-U screwjob grumble grumble) ” … so we’ll give you credit for this one. Go pick out a new one if you want.”…….

Huh?

Let me get this straight, I got full credit for the system? No kidding?!? At that point, I tried to marry the young lady helping me. Security drug me off of her and pointed me to the notebook department. I walked out with a new Toshiba Satellite with 2GB RAM, a 1.73ghz Centrino Duo CPU, 200GB hard drive, same big 17″ display. Sweet!

I am now a Circuit City customer for life.

I guess they occasionally serve their purpose.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.