Trust

“It don’t work!” announced the poorly-groomed individual to whom I attributed the ungodly cloud of body odour tinged with the scent of tobacco and what I presumed to be the residual smell of excrement.

It don’t? Speak to me in riddles.

“Well sir, what exactly doesn’t work?”

“That goddamned video card I bought from y’all a week ago. I hooked it up Saturday, it worked like a beaut for about 30 minutes an’ then it just quit.”

On the up-side, this tells me that it’s probably not his monitor and really isolates about a dozen other potential causes. In any event, I offer to test and replace the part.

“Why you gotta test it? Ain’t my word good enough?”

Sure is buddy… I don’t know you from Adam, you’ve spent maybe $100 in my store.  But I’ll give you free hardware.

“Well sir, my vendor’s policy states that I must certify a part as non-functioning and sign off on it in order to get my money back.  In order to do that, I’ll have to test the video card.”

“Oh… well I didn’t bring it!   Can I have the replacement now and drop the part by tomorrow?”  I’m starting to smell a rat.

“I’ll tell you what, sir.  You can buy a replacement video card today and when you come by with the old video card, I’ll refund you your money.”  He doesn’t look too happy, but I guess ‘a bird in the hand’ and all of that.

Fast forward to this morning.

My redneck friend has returned.  Oh joy of joys!

“I told you it don’t work!”  Taking the video card from his hand, it was as if it had sat in a factory smokestack for a year rather than in my customer’s hovel for a week.

I went to hook the unit up when I cut myself on a sharp edge on the unit.   Taking a closer look at the scraped heat sink on the video card, I had a sudden epiphany.  “So, did you have any trouble fitting this in your computer sir.”

“Well, yeah, but then I just got my tools out and took this here extra metal off and it worked just fine!”

“Sir, removing the cooling on this card invalidates the warranty. I can’t accept this.”

My redneck friend flushed bright red, “The hell you can’t!  You told me yesterday you’d take my card back!  You’ll give me my money or I’m gonna call the police!”

“Sir, you may call the police or the Better Business Bureau or anyone you’d like.  If you invalidate your warranty, I can’t help you.”

“You can keep the card, I’m gonna get my money!”

Well, this should be exciting.  I’m keeping the card in a plastic bag in case he wants it.

On the Receiving End

I’ve debated at length to the extent of which I’m willing to include my personal life here, and I’ve not made any conclusions. That said, I’ve just had a hellacious experience dealing with U-Haul, and I felt it was worth including a copy of the note I sent them:

To say that my experiences with U-Haul have been negative fail to fully describe the nature of my ordeal. The problems with the rental began before my arrival on the scene, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick with the problems relevant to me, which began after I became involved.
A friend of mine rented a moving truck with which to conduct a 1-way move across the state of Texas and due to complications involving his drivers’ license (read: “crap… my drivers’ license expires today so they won’t let me drive”), it became necessary that someone else drive the truck, and I volunteered (read: “I was the only schmuck along who had a valid drivers’ license). At the time, I was asked for my driver’s license and a secondary form of identification, for which I used my MasterCard. At that point in time, I made sure to ask the man at the desk two or three times if my credit card would be charged under any circumstances and I was assured repeatedly that under no circumstances would my card be charged. (Seriously, this guy didn’t look like much of a winner in the ‘Brains’ Department, so I kept asking to pound this point in… apparently, it didn’t take.)
Of course, as would be necessitated by my irritation, my credit card was charged. As soon as I received my credit card statement and noticed the errant charge, I called the independent dealer where the rental was started and the lady with whom I spoke was pleasantly helpful. I was promised a call for the next day by the manager, which I received first thing in the morning after he had researched my case. He apologized and told me that my name was not, in fact, listed as the driver and that somehow my credit card had simply been amended to the file due to an employee mistake.  In fact, he even confessed that had I been pulled over, I would have been in some trouble in that my name was not anywhere on the paperwork.  He also noted that he was sadly unable to resolve the issue in-store and would be forced to escalate me to the corporate offices. (Note: he would be the second and last intelligent employee with whom I would speak. Also notable was that he and the first lady with whom I spoke actually had brains and customer service skills and didn’t work for U-Haul; the next 5 employees fit none of these criterion.)
Uhaul Corporate is worthless. Well, the receptionist is helpful enough, but the actual call-center failed to accomplish a single thing beyond wasting my time and exposing me to impressive lengths of heretofore unexperienced elevator-type hold music. I had to call on three separate occasions:

Call 1:  Apparently unable to communicate with their rental offices, the call center required the same information I had given the rental office.  After taking it all down, I was assured that I would be contacted within 48 hours.

Call 2: I called back 2 days later.  The call lady made a particular point of stressing that I had to wait 48 hours, and after being informed that I had done so, her admission that she could do nothing for me seemed almost anti-climactic.  After some pressing, she admitted that she could, in fact, file a complaint for me, but she claimed that there was nothing else that she could do for me.

Call 3: I carried the false hope that perhaps someone from U-Haul would call me, but 5 days later, I decided that I’d had enough with the waiting and called.  This time, after pressing, I was told that I might be able to be helped and was transferred the relevant Uhaul Regional Office.

Unfortunately,  after being transferred, the manager who was required in order to rectify things for me was not in and I was told that I would have to hope for a call back.  The next day, I was pleasantly surprised that the manager from the regional office actually called back as promised.  At this time, I found out that he was the one to whom my complaints were supposed to have been directed in the first place, complaints that he claimed to have never seen nor heard of until I left the message.  I was inclined to believe him and gave my sad tale for the third time… I was inclined, that is, until after he got my information and went about his way, and became impossible to contact. For the next week.

In fact, after a week of trying to get ahold of him without so much as a peep, I finally decided to do what I should have done a week and a half earlier: call my credit card company and dispute the charge. Most notably, within 48 hours of my contacting my credit card company, I was informed that the issue had been resolved as opposed to the better than two weeks it took me dealing with your personnel. Oddly enough, your company has managed to attempt to turn me from a non-party into a customer and in so doing has made me loath to even associate with it, much less patronize it.

Returning to Roost

I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I returned from lunch to the sight of an all-too-familiar van in my parking lot. I inhaled and cursed my mind for playing tricks on me; I was surely just imagining things… there are lots of rust-covered vans in the world, right? And as I walked into the store, there stood Lenny, computer in hand.

A quick glance at Lenny was enough to remind me why I loathed dealing with the man, in person. First, he’s the paramount of bad hygiene¹: there are sores on his arms that he’s constantly picking at with his yellowed and infected fingernails, he smells like dog excrement, his front teeth are half-rotted and he looks like he hasn’t bathed in quite some time. Further, his clothing belies the same attention to detail as his hygiene and is usually torn, covered in grease and full of holes located in strategically unfortunate spots.

“Lenny, what can I do for you?” Damnit, I know that it’s been almost a year, but I banned you for a reason.

“Jason said it would be alright if I brought my computer by.” Of course he did… as the Store Manager, it’s really hard to take the afternoon off if your Assistant Manager is out dealing with a corporate account. Damnit, Jason!

“That’s fine, tell me what’s wrong with the computer and then I’ll have a look at it.” Yeah… I know when I’m beaten.

“Oh, well you see…” This is the other reason I hate having Lenny in my store. When Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the soul of wit, I imagine it was on the heels of having a conversation with someone a lot like Lenny. 5 minutes later, all Lenny had told me is that the computer wouldn’t load into Windows and that Lenny thought this might be due to overheating… which is dead wrong. That’s like telling me that your car has a flat tire and you think it’s because the car is out of gas.

Anyways, I finally convinced Lenny that it was time for him to leave so that I could look at the computer and that I was, in no uncertain terms, going to work on it while he waited. So, with Lenny finally out of the store, I actually took a look at his computer. A quick glance caused me to do a double-take. Lenny had removed all of the tamper-proof stickers. And what’s more, the rivets I had put in place last time to ensure that Lenny stayed out of the computer had all been removed. A closer examination revealed that Lenny had not stopped at the rivets necessary to open the case and had removed several of the rivets that were holding the case together. And, for the Pièce de Résistance, Lenny had replaced all of the rivets with three-inch wood screws.

Standing agape, I went back and got Jason and all of the technicians to have a look at the case: it was a wonder to behold. And yet, opening the case, it was immaculate: it was as if Lenny had gone to all of the trouble of taking the rivets and the stickers off just to look inside. It was obvious Lenny had touched nothing and believe me, if he’d done something, I would have noticed. I’ve seen Lenny’s work, to put it nicely, it matches Lenny’s appearance perfectly: if he’d been fucking around inside of this case, it would have been as obvious as a toddler taking to the wall of the Sistene Chapel with finger-paints.

So, before I canceled Lenny’s contract, I figured I owed him a phone call. “Lenny, I took a look at your computer and I noticed that you’ve been in there in breach of your contract… could you tell me why you did that?”

“Well, like I told you, I thought the thing was dusty and overheatin’, so before I called y’all out there and paid for more service time, I figured I’d clean it out myself.” Coherent and oddly logical, is this Lenny? Lenny on his meds, even? Surely not!

“Alright Lenny, I’m going to talk to Jason, but I think we’ll let it slide this time, provided that you don’t do this again.” Believe me, I’d just as soon stay out of court, which is probably what voiding his contract would lead to.

“Thank you so much. I’m really sorry, I just didn’t want to come all the way into town or have y’all come out.”

“Alright Lenny, I’ll get back to you.”

At this point, given that there are 6 months left on the contract and with the state of things, voiding his contract would just be silly, so I talked to Jason and decided that we’d just seal the computer back up and give Lenny another chance. Fixing his computer took all of 30 minutes and then we took out the rest of the wood screws (the ones holding the case together), riveted it, sealed it and called Lenny. And, seeing that Jason had already left for the afternoon, Lenny got to come in and get his computer.

Unfortunately, there were several other customers there to drop off computers and Lenny got to talk to them. One of the customers, showing uncommon good sense, scooted away from Lenny, who was looking and smelling like he’d crawled out of an open sewer. My other customer, inexplicably, stood and talked to Lenny and listened to all of his crackpot ideas about what was wrong with her computer. As a result, by the time she got to the counter, she was convinced that her computer wouldn’t power on at all because of a problem with Windows. To expand on my earlier example, Lenny was telling her that her car had a flat tire because she hadn’t waxed her car lately.

So, yet again, it was with great pleasure that I watched the door hit Lenny on the way out. And with any luck, it will be another year before I see Lenny again.

¹Many of you will notice that I find bad hygiene epidemic of my worst customers. Think about that: if you give no thought to your own health or presentability, it’s unlikely that your personality will deviate from that too much. In other words, if you don’t care about taking care of yourself or putting effort towards social graces, it’s unlikely that you have invested any effort in your interpersonal communication or your computer. Put frankly: you’re probably a slob and a jackass and those rarely make good customers.

Lost in a Foreign Land

Computers are a complex and foreign concept for many people, so it’s not particularly unusual for my customers to come through the front door looking lost. That said, this customer looked out of place: the clothes were all wrong and the man definitely didn’t look like he was from around here.

“No speak English good.” He pointed at himself. “Brazil.”

Damn, he communicates with me and he doesn’t even speak English… he’s already miles ahead of my normal customers.

“No speak Portuguese,” I returned. Hey buddy, we’re in the same boat.

He pointed at his ears. “MP3?”

Well, if he wanted an MP3 player, I really don’t do that sort of thing. That said, if I’m going to send him somewhere else, I want to be sure. “iPod?”

“What iPod?” Oh boy… well, I’ve got one last option that I really don’t like to use.

“Hablo un poco de Español.” (I speak a little bit of Spanish.)

His eyes lit up, “Oh! Si! Necesito…” and he was off. My Spanish is actually relatively wretched; I took several years of it in high school and I could negotiate through a foreign country with it and hopefully not get shot or die of starvation, but no better than this guy apparently spoke English.

“Menos rapido! Menos rapido! Solamento comprendo un poco! Un POQUITO!”(Slow down! Slow down! I only understand a little… a VERY little.)

“MP3. Necesito un jugado de MP3 para escuchar musico.” (I need an MP3 player to listen to music.)

“Quiere un iPod. No vendo los iPods.” (You want an iPod. I don’t sell iPods.)

“Oh! Si! iPod…” and he was off again. Fortunately, I have a list of places that I send some business to. So rather than play Translator a little longer, I ran off a list and circled a couple of the places. When he realized that I was running him off a list and a map he trailed off and waited eagerly for the map.

After I showed him the map and pointed out the places that he would want to go, he eagerly bounded out the door, reverting back into Spanish or Portuguese or something. I guess I’m curious what he wanted with the iPod that he suddenly wanted one now that he was abroad, but my Spanish is so bad that I’ll probably never know.

From The Horse’s Mouth

As I’ve noted before, the BBB is my friend and not yours.  Rather than recall in my usual fashion my latest interaction with a moron who decided to go to the BBB, why don’t you just read my adaptation of his complaint and my response?

Regarding our first meeting with Mr. Ornery, he brought us a CD-R on X date, requesting that we recover his emails from the backup files on the disc.  1 Week later (not 3, per his claim… see attached photocopies with his signatures), Mr. Ornery was given a 2nd CD-R with the data recovered, in addition to the first CD-R.  The data recovered was saved in two different formats to minimize difficulties: a straight .txt format and in the data file format used by Eudora, which is easily imported into any modern email client that I know of.

The following week, Mr. Ornery called to inform us that he was having problems with the CD-R that we had provided and was unable to retrieve his email.  While going over this issue on the phone with him and owing to interactiosn that followed, it has since become painfully evident that Mr. Ornery has very little grasp of computers or any real knack for using them.
The following Friday, Mr. Ornery returned, computer in hand, along with both CD-Rs.  At this point, one of our technicians loaded the emails directly into Mr. Ornery’s email program.  Because of the confusion, when Mr. Ornery came into the store a week later to pick up his computer, The Assistant Manager went over the emails with him and saw to it that Mr. Ornery was satisfied before he paid and left with his computer.

On the Monday after Mr. Ornery picked up his computer, he called The Computer Store to inform me that he was unhappy  with some piece of the email retrieval that had been done for his computer, for reasons that have never been entirely clear.  Because of this dissatisfaction, The Assistant Manager offered to attempt to figure out what Mr. Ornery’s problem actually was and try to fix it.  However, even in light of this offer, Mr. Ornery was willing neither to bring his computer back to the shop nor explain the nature of his complaints, even going so far as to resort to the storied line, “Y’all already know what’s wrong an’ ain’t fixin’ it.”  Even so, in an effort to ascertain the nature of Mr. Ornery’s complaints, The Assistant Manager went so far as to contact Mr. Ornery’s ISP and make inquiries as to how the customer might be helped.  In the end, however, it was the conclusion of the staff of The Computer Store that Mr. Ornery’s problems were chiefly with his inability to use his computer and his unwillingness to return for help.  Even so, when The Assistant Manager went on vacation, he left instructions that should Mr. Ornery call, he be encouraged to return to The Computer Store in order that he could be educated and in person and any outstanding issues could be explained and resolved.

While The Assistant Manager was on vacation, Mr. Ornery did, in fact, contact The Computer Store and was directed to Jason, The Store Manager.  Jason informed Mr. Ornery that he should bring his computer in upon The Assistant Manager’s return, which was scheduled to be within the week.  Mr. Ornery refused, insisting that the staff at The Computer Store and the Assistant Manager in particular hadn’t done “a damned thing to help him” and that he wanted his money back.  When Mr. Ornery was informed that it is not the policy of The Computer Store to give refunds for services successfully rendered.  Further, Mr. Ornery was told that he was welcome to come in to The Computer Store at any time for a demonstration of where the solution to his problems lay.  Instead, Mr. Ornery insulted Jason and threatened to contact the Better Business Bureau with his version of events, which he has since done.

Us and They

Ginny is an odd bird. Whenever a customer comes to me with a request for a $5000 computer and then laughs it off as a oddity meant for a side hobby, I find myself raising my eyebrows until I remember, “Ah yes… rich people.” It is said that the rich are the same as you and I and in my interactions with them, I’ve discovered this to be true to an extent. That said, there is equal and perhaps greater truth in the aphorism, “The rich do not live as you and I do.” And in my estimation, this living in such a different way than Everyman leads to eccentricities not exhibited by the public at large and accentuating differences that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. After all, you don’t call a homeless person who talks loudly to himself in the presence of others eccentric, you call him crazy.

Ginny is an even odder case than most in that she is the wife of an affluent lawyer who has the uncommon good morals not to jettison her for a younger model.¹ This restraint is doubly impressive in that Ginny’s eccentricities and quirks have turned her into a very dis tractable and very annoying woman. But, oddly enough, even though Ginny seems to annoy her husband almost as much as she annoys me, he tolerates her eccentricities. Rather, he tolerates her eccentricities by encouraging her to have more hobbies. And thus she came to me for a computer that would make her a better photographer.

Ginny is like a number of my more affluent clients in that, among those for whom money is a given, the best solution to a problem is to meet it with money. Thus, if you are not as good a photographer as you’d like to be, you buy a computer that will run all of the latest photo-editing and developing software with a large monitor and the best video card, processor and memory that money can buy. So long as you stay within your allowance, of course. This doesn’t even begin to address the digital camera or all of the attendant costs of a film camera and dark room… but that’s Ginny’s concern and her husband’s problem, not mine.

Now, building a good computer is much easier than building a bad one, and so equipping Ginny with everything that she needed was not much of an issue. But, of course, Ginny is high maintenance and to be otherwise would be against her nature, and so the issues came later. But, at least for the first couple of months after purchasing her computer, life was bliss and Ginny rarely graced me with her presence except to buy new things with which to advance her hobby.

Several months later, Ginny brought her computer in with a distraught look on her face, “Windows won’t open PhotoShop today! It wouldn’t open it yesterday either and I think it’s mad at me.” Ummm… what did you do to Windows? Are you sleeping with Linux on the side or something?

Before I let my tongue get away with all of the witty remarks that were flitting about in my head, I busied myself with diagnosing her computer. I have never seen an installation of Windows run so far amok and yet without a single virus. A half an hour of inquiry and finally a picture began to emerge as to what exactly Ginny had done to her computer.

As with many of those who came of age during the development of the World Wide Web, I remember the subtle change in the sourcing of research papers as it came to light that information could be found on the internet as well as on the computer resources in the library and from actual print publications. And then, almost minutes later it seemed, the more overt change in checking of sources as it came to light that any dumbass with a modem and a keyboard (or maybe just two tin cans and a spool of yarn) could publish a webpage. Worse still, with the advent of shitheaps like GeoCities, any idiot could cobble together a page even if he lacked the patience or wherewithal to learn HTML, which had heretofore been the incredibly low bar of admittance to online publishing. I must confess that I was guilty on more than one occasion in Jr. High to have published a page that liberally plagiarized another source to inflate those wonderful source counts imposed by teachers.²

Like many of the students caught by this bygone age in paper writing or their modern brethren who consult Wikipedia without thought to its potentially-unwashed origins, Ginny has a problem identifying trustworthy and reliable sources of computer advice. And thus, when she came into my store complaining of her computer’s inability to perform a number of routine tasks, what she failed to note was that she’d been schlepping through her registry and her configuration files, altering things willy-nilly at the advice of the proverbial armchair mechanics of computer repair. After all, I don’t tell her how to shoot pictures or how to edit them or how to do things in photography at all. The least the morons on the photo-editing sites could do is extend me the same courtesy.

And the worst part is that the vast majority of these sites give great advice, advise due caution and are generally circumspect in how they work. And yet, Ginny manages to completely avoid such wise sites and manages to find the dark alleys of the internet from which to glean her advice or worse still, when she does take good advice, she manages to implement it all backwards such that it might have been better simply to turn off her antivirus and firewall and let in the malicious hordes who at least keep a computer in a semblance of working so that it is usable in whatever nefarious scheme is on the move. Your average virus would have to spend two or three hours fixing Ginny’s computer before it could be put to any use at all.

I wish I could say that Ginny’s status had changed or that my attempts at educating her had made her a better consumer and a better person. But the fact of the matter is that customers like Ginny need something more than a simple education… they need to understand that money is not a salve nor a cure-all… and I really can’t say I’ve taught her that. After all, she messes her computer up and gums it all to hell, she comes in, she pays me several hundred dollars to fix it and fix it fast, and she leaves with her computer back to good by the close of business. In short, I perpetuate the problem… but at least it pays well to be a part of the problem.

¹I once heard it said by a crass doctor who I do work for that you do with wives as you do with money that you want to use: once you get into 40s and 50s, you change them in for 20s.

²While I don’t confess to publishing utter fabrications to source papers, I did know those who did and I might have engaged my entrepreneurial spirit to make a buck or two by assisting in such endeavors.

Lying in Wait

The office next door to The Computer Store is the home office of some sort of sales team who sell drugs or legal aid or insurance or something.  All I know is that half of their sales rep make a practice out of parking right out in front of The Computer Store in the fire lane rather than out in the parking lot.  Talking to the individual reps in question gets a nice “Oh, I’m sorry, I won’t do that again” which is promptly forgotten.  The pathetic thing about this is that the farthest spot in the parking lot is MAYBE 100 feet, and yet I can’t convince these morons to park in the actual parking spaces rather than blocking my front door and getting in the way.

After failing at the personal charm route, I decided to go with an appeal to authority and talk to the office manager.  Same conversation as with her employees, and with the same results.  Screw this, I’ll go to the top of the food chain.  A quick phone call to my land-lord ended with my being forbidden to have the bastards towed without his consent.  On each individual incident.

So I was left at an impasse and very annoyed.  Until, on a completely unrelated note, a friend sent me a link to YouParkLikeAnAsshole.com.  Well… unrelated in the sense that he didn’t know of my evil plans.  I’ve since printed off 50 or so of the things and have yet to decide whether or not to include anyone else or to leave this as a solo mission.  I mean, it’s tempting to involve minions, but at the same time, I’d like to keep any potential shit-storms that arise from this to myself.  I’ll be posting on further developments as things progress.

TMI… TM Freaking I

“Thank you for calling The Computer Store, this is The Assistant Manager, how can I be of assistance?”

“HELLO!” shrieked the little old lady on the other end of the phone. “I need to talk to Dr. Jones!”

“Ma’am, I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number. This is The Computer Store.”

“Yes? Dr. Jones, those sores on my inner thighs and buttocks have gotten bigger and they’re starting to seep, what do I do?”

“Ummm… ma’am…”

“Speak up, I can’t hear you!”

*click*

Good Prozac Makes Good Customers

There are bad customers and then there are Bad Customers. While it’s rare, every so often I run across customers so unpleasant, unsavory and downright abusive to my employees that I send them off into exile and, in so doing, promote them to Bad Customers. Such customers (or Customers) are they very bane of my existence because they almost always leave me with an upset employee or two, not to mention the fact that we’ve probably had problems with 90% of our Bad Customers for a while before they get their promotions, and thus I get into the annoying hair-splitting of where I draw the line of bad customer and Bad Customer.

The worst kind of Bad Customer, however, is the kind with a warranty or a service contract. After all, I can’t really drop the exile on someone whom I’m contractually obligated to deal with unless I want to get into the whole lawyers and pistols at dawn and all of that, much as I would love to run those couple of customers off. And while I run short of such Customers in terms of quantity, they more than make up for their shortness in numbers in terms of their quality. And of these the most noteworthy by far, if not the most obnoxious, is Lenny.

By all accounts, Lenny is on a fairly prodigious regiment of psychoanaleptics. And, I have to admit, when he’s on his meds, Lenny is an annoyance at worst and, while not fascinating, I get paid to deal with far worse. The problem is that the man is never on his damned meds. Oh… and he’s got a 5-year service contract for his small business.

When Lenny’s off his meds, it’s like dealing with an impetuous 5-year-old who exhibits strange paranoid tendancies. He’s loud, he’s obnoxious, he throws tantrums and he’s convinced that the world is out to get him. Even more fun is that he loves to hover over my shoulder while I’m working on his computers, ask questions, second-guess my actions and tell me how he would’ve fixed the computer – all the while bitching about my hatefully sealing his computers so he couldn’t “fix” them.

Come to think of it, while I’ve been working on Lenny’s account for over two years, I have no idea of what business he’s in… mostly because best as I can tell, Lenny spends all of his time thinking up new ways to break his computers and calling us to fix them. One of my first orders of business upon taking on Lenny’s account from the employee who had been dealing with it was to seal his computer with tamper-proof labels and making the continuation of his contract pursuant to the maintanance of those seals. This pissed off my “computer guru” immensely, and yet, since I’ve prevented Lenny from working on his computers, I’ve had a 40% reduction in Lenny-related service calls. And while this certainly helped, Lenny’s follow-ups led to his most remarkable accomplishment: Lenny is my only active customer who is also currently banned from coming to the Computer Store. And how did he accomplish this?

I’m sure I was doing something productive when my caller id popped up ‘Lenny Harris’, at which point I broke into dulcet strains of profanity, which was still more productive than the act which followed. Apparently, Lenny was having difficulties with his office computer, which he was trying to do some video editing with. God only knows what Lenny was doing with a video editor, or a video capture card for that matter, all I know is that Lenny with technology is a lot like a toddler with a machete: nothing good can come of it and someone or something is going to end up broken.

In any event, per the usual, I dragged my feet, took out the trash, ran off invoices, sent out bills and cleaned some toilets before I brought myself to drive over to Lenny’s “office.” Upon my arrival at the trailer adjoining Lenny’s house, I squeezed in past two of Lenny’s grotesque family-member employees and headed into Lenny’s office. After listening to an inane rehash of what Lenny had just babbled to me over the phone complete with physical demonstration. After a quick analysis, I concluded that the computer needed a reload and grimaced as I told Lenny such. Because as much as I hate working with Lenny perched on my shoulder, I was pretty sure the curious calls every hour or two would make me that much more irritated, not to mention the temptations for vengeance that such calls inevitably fill my employees with regarding the sabotage of Lenny’s computers. That said, there was no way in hell that I would be wasting at least a day redoing Windows on Lenny’s computer his office nor would I impart the pain of that act on any of my employees (and really, that’s the other half of the reason that I wasn’t sticking around), so off to The Shop with Lenny’s computer I went.

Two days and easily two dozen phone calls later (including the 4 or 5 that the stupid bastard made to the emergency 24-hour phone line that rang to my cell phone), Lenny came to The Computer Store in person to inquire as to what was taking us so long with his computer. As my employees and I had told him numerous times over the course of the last 48 hours, Lenny’s computer was not first in the queue, he didn’t want to pay to expedite it, and it was seriously screwed up as a result of the paleolithic video capture card that he’d bought and installed prior to my sealing his computer. In fact, I’d been getting dangerously close to telling Lenny to take his video card and shove it even before he made his appearance.

Even before having entered the front door, Lenny had managed to clear the sales floor of personnel by reputation and I was summoned from the back in order to deal with his impending arrival. Sputtering even as he entered, Lenny began shouting, “Where’s my computer? Why ain’t you got my computer done? I pay top dollar for this service contract and I expect my computer to be fixed prompt like!”

“Mr. Harris, sir…” I started. Lenny, however, was in rare form.

“WHERE THE HELL IS MY COMPUTER! YOU STUPID BASTARDS CAN’T FIX ANYTHING!”

“Sir! Calm down… we have your computer…”

“FUCK YOU! IMMA TAKE MY COMPUTER AN’ FIX IT MY FUCKING SELF!”

My first rule of customer service is that I give the customer every chance to calm down and be reasonable before things get ugly. My second rule is that if things do get ugly, I won’t back down. And my third rule is that I don’t cuss at a customer unless they start it.

“Dammnit Lenny, calm down and get it together. Are you on your meds?”

And, like clockwork, my mercurial customer got it together. Well, that’s a lie. He burst out into tears… but at least he stopped screaming. After calming Lenny down to crying, I got him to go out to his car and go home and I told him I’d call that afternoon. Oddly enough, Lenny called first.

“Assistant Manager, I’d like to apologize for this morning, I forgot to take my medications.”

“It’ll be alright Lenny, we’ll talk about it when I bring your computer by. Oh… and we won’t be able to use that video capture card, so I’ll bill you for a replacement when I stop by.” See that? Even as I’m getting screwed, I can turn an advantage. That’s why I’m The Assistant Manager.

And so I returned the next morning with Lenny’s computer, newly functional and now bearing quality parts. “Lenny, we need to talk. I’m more than happy to continue to do work for you, but after that incident yesterday, I can’t have you coming to The Computer Store.”

Lenny was obviously taken aback and a little stricken, after all, coming to The Computer Store was one of his favorite past-times. But at the same time, having Lenny screaming and cursing at me in my store is not one of my favorites, nor would it be good for business. At the same time, given the circumstances, I really didn’t want to lose his business. Fortunately, considering that Lenny was in the wrong, he was willing to make some concessions. And so he became my most unique customer: The Bad Customer who still pays me money to do work for him. If only we could get him to stay on his damned meds, we might even let him come back. Maybe.

Sell Me Crap!

It’s a rare day that finds me standing at the front counter when a customer enters the store, but that’s precisely where I was, fooling with my register computer, when my newest redneck customer walked through the front door. “Good morning, sir. Welcome to The Computer Store. What can I do for you?”

“Good mornin’. I just blew me up a power supply and I need a new one. Whatcha got?”

Now, we carry a number of prudcts that I would never put inside of my own computer, but I am particularly proud that this is not the case with our power supplies. Our power supplies (over which I have exercised brutal control and more than one disagreement with vendors) include only the most respectable brands that I can get and nothing that I wouldn’t trust $3000 of my own equipment with. So I was taken aback after I showed this customer to the power supplies and he scowled at the selection. Turning to me he asked, “Where do y’all keep yer Tiger Pros?”

As I’ve stated in the past, I refuse to get into arguments with fanboys and partisans of particular brands of products. In my opinion, it’s like trying to convince a Chevy man to buy a Ford – there’s no succeeding and the best you can hope for is a headache, a sore throat and two wasted hours. That said, there’s always one moron in any crowd who refused to drive a Chevy or a Ford because his Daewoo is better than any other truck. And while I won’t argue with fanboys, the guy with the Daewoo is so damned much fun to tease that I usually can’t help but start into an argument with him.

To call Tiger Pro the Daewoo of power supplies is an insult to Daewoo… Tiger Pro is more appropriately one of those Russian cars that falls apart 3 or 4 years after you buy it. You know, the ones that they don’t bother exporting out of the Eastern Bloc because nobody in his right mind who has any options at all will buy one? Yeah, the Tiger Pro is one of those. If it weren’t for the fact that your average Joe knows absolutely nothing about what’s inside of his computer and that the average Tiger Pro costs a distributor $20, nobody would have a Tiger Pro.

So it was that I shot Joe Redneck a questioning look, “Why on earth do you want a Tiger Pro, sir?”

The scowl changed to a smug smile. “For my money, ain’t nuthin better than a Tiger Pro power supply!” I’ll definitely be needing to check into that money of his before I take it… if it’s not been raided from a Monopoly box, I’m betting it’s just plain old counterfeit.

“Sir, if you consult ANY objective product rating service, Tiger Pro ranks consistently among the worst of power supplies. Last I checked, it was even outranked by 2 or 3 companies who don’t even clearly label their power supplies owing to the questionable reputation of their products. If you hold on a second, I think I have a magazine in the back…”

Joe jumped right in, “Now hold on! That’s just a bunch of bullshit! Jus’ because they don’ want to pay kickbacks to them review places and magazines don’ mean they ain’t got the best damn power supplies out there!” Great… a redneck conspiracy theorist. Maybe he was once abducted by aliens… damned shame that I didn’t find out for sure.

“Well sir, all that notwithstanding, they also have both the highest failure and the greatest attrition rates of any power supply that I’ve gotten into my store, which is especially remarkable given that every computer that comes in for service with a Tiger Pro in it is one that I didn’t put in there. I mean, think about that… I get more computers from other places with Tiger Pros that need work on them than I get of my own customers, whose units I will replace for free: that’s a lot of broken Tiger Pros. Not to mention that, as I said before, when a Tiger Pro goes, it takes out more internal components than any other power supply I’ve seen. That’s like an engine that’s guaranteed to go out 100,000 miles before the competition’s and that’s guaranteed to throw a rod which will take out 50% of the components in your engine compartment when it goes. Why would you want a power supply like that?”

“Yer just’ sayin’ that cuz you don’ like ‘em!” He proclaimed. It was at this point that I kind of slowed down as I noted that his eyes were taking on the glaze of a fanatic under attack. I was apparently going after Joe’s religion.

“Sir, it’s true I dislike them, but that has everything to do with what I’ve just told you. Think about this from my point of view: I can buy Tiger Pros at roughly 20% of the cost of what I buy those power supplies for. So, even if I sold them at half of what I’m selling those power supplies for now, like some of the Other Computer Stores do, I would make a huge profit. If they weren’t just terrible power supplies, what possible reason could I have for not selling them?”

“Cuz yer a crook!” he near-shouted, turning and storming out the front door.

I was tempted to chase after him and shout, “Yeah! That’s it! Fight the logic!” but I didn’t. After all, he didn’t cuss me out. I mean, that really would have hurt my feelings.