tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17623176617035218212011-04-21T15:19:54.428-07:00Virtual Photonsnoreply@blogger.comBlogger11100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1762317661703521821.post-689787819033105362008-09-01T10:09:00.000-07:002008-09-01T10:58:04.887-07:00<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I'm going to start this section with a crappy-device, corporate disinterest rant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">About a year and a half ago, I bought a Motorola RAZR through T-Mobile. This phone was taken care of like a baby princess; always nicely cushioned, rarely exposed to daylight or made to work... </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">One month after the first year had passed, the mini-screen on the phone decided it needed to stay on all the time, showing a cool little BSOD (reminiscent of the best days of Microsoft); which sucked up so much power the phone would only stay charged for half a day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">I emailed T-Mobile but got no response other than the standard e-mail back stating 'thanks, we received your cry of indignation and shall respond to it in short order.' They didn't, so I called. The rep said since it was past the one year which would have been sort of covered, they could do nothing. I'd need to call Motorola, which I did very quickly, right after my phone was charged back up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">Motorola said 'sure we'll fix it for you - just mail it to us in the original box with a check for $89.' Umm, what? The phone you said was a revolution spontaneously breaks after a year of minimal use, and I have to pay you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">This is when the buzzard really came home to roost. The product I was told I was getting - a paragon of phone technology - existed only in the imagination. In meat-space (otherwise known as the human reality), I would receive a product which had a certain degree of fallibility, a possible chance of failure. Anyone who bought one of the phones would receive this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">And this would not have to be a problem, except that T-Mobile and Motorola hold the customers responsible for the failure. So they spew out upon the world a plethora of hand-helds, of which a certain number are bound to crap out, and when those phones do fail, the customer has to deal with it. Nice, huh.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">Just to check my thinking, I called Verizon and posed the question to a rep - what if my phone failed after the first year, due to no fault of my own? She said they'd mail me a very low-end model, no charge, to get me through until I was due to renew my contract.</span></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1762317661703521821-68978781903310536?l=virtualphotons-technoid.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Virtual Photonsnoreply@blogger.com0