Here's the situation. A customer brought in her 386 Compaq laptop
because her mail program had suddenly stopped working. Well, to make a
long story short, one of my employees ended up dropping the laptop on a
hard floor, resulting in a large crack in the display. The customer
initially didn't care because she always plugged a monitor into it
anyway--she never used the laptop's display. Other than the crack, the
machine was fine. Shortly afterward, however, her problems with the
mail program got worse. a Closer inspection revealed that the hard disk
was failing and a surface scan revealed a number of bad clusters. I
suspect that the hard disk had actually started to fail before the
machine was ever dropped, but obviously, the customer won't believe
that, and we have no way of knowing that for sure. We broke it, we need
to fix it.
So anyway, when this happened, I immediately hopped on ebay and found a
replacement laptop for her. Her laptop was a 386-25, 8MB RAM, 150 MB
Hard disk, Win 3.1. The replacement I found for her is a 486-33, 8 MB
RAM, 210 MB hard disk, Win 95. It cost about $200. When we informed
her that we had a new laptop on it's way for her, she said that she
didn't want a laptop, but instead wanted a desktop machine. So, we
contacted a local computer guy who said he could put together a good 486
machine from used parts for a couple hundred dollars. Well, in the
meantime, the customer contacted her "computer expert" friend who told
her she needed a Pentium II 350, 64 MB RAM, 6.4 GB Hard disk. Well, now
she expects us to "at least pay half" the cost of this new PII machine.
I told her that we can't be expected to replace a 386 with a PII, or to
even pay half of it. I told her that a 386 would be worth no more than
$100, so I said that she could either take the 486 laptop we had
purchased for her, or we would pay $100 toward the purchase of any other
machine she wanted. Well, now she's *Really* upset. I told her that
the 486 we were going to give her was actually a better machine than her
old one, but she's upset that she "didn't have a choice". I've given
her all kinds of examples (if someone wrecks your '72 Pinto worth $500,
you can't expect the insurance to buy you brand new $20,000 Taurus--or
to even pay half of that. All you'd get is $500--the value of the
Pinto). She won't listen to that, however. She just keeps saying "well
you're not an insurance company" and "well my laptop was working fine
before this happened..." It's about to drive me nuts!!!! There's just
no way to reason with her!
I realize we broke the laptop, and we feel very bad about it (my
employee especially), but I can't see anyone expecting us to replace a
386 with a Pentium II. The customer is talking about small claims
court, etc. Are we in the right here???
Finally, I'm wondering what other ISPs do when working on customer
machines. I know a lot of you try to help customers with their machines
when things aren't working right. How do you protect yourself against
this kind of thing? Do you make the customer sign something stating
that you cannot be held liable for any damages etc. etc.? Or do you
just rely on your liability insurance?
Thanks, and sorry again for the off-topic post.
Craig
Xpressweb Internet Services
bairdc@xpressweb.com
http://www.xpressweb.com
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