The Diatribe * net

I love Best Buy. They have a great product selection, great prices, and it’s always fun to explore and check out all the fun toys. Another reason I’ve loved Best Buy has been their product replacement plan. I’ve been a firm believer that their in-store warranty system has been one of the best around. That is, until they started outsourcing the repair to a company known as Geek Squad. (This is gonna be a doozy, a true diatribe about how much I despise this company and how they have molested my poor little iPod. I just need to get it out of my system..)

July, 2005:
It all started just after we had moved here. I plugged my iPod into my computer, try to add songs, and blammo: either my iPod, iMac or both would crash every time — guaranteed. So, I take my little white music machine into my nearest Best Buy, and explain that my battery seems to be very low (about 2 hours) and that it will not sync with my computer. They tell me it will be three weeks to fix, but that they will ship it to me, so I’ll not need to come back into the city to pick it up. No problem.

I log on their web site daily to check the status of the repair and after three weeks I check and it says “Shipped to customer” — Great! On its way back home to daddy. When it comes, I get a box the size of a shoebox with something rattling around inside. I open it open, and low-and-behold my iPod is there with a ltttle note and no padding that says “Nothing wrong with hard drive, replaced battery.” Furious that there was no protection in the box, I rush home to see if what they say is true — but alas, I still cannot transfer songs.

August, 2005:
So, not only does it not transfer songs, but the battery seems a LOT laggier. Also, I noticed that I could not charge it with anything but my computer. When I’d plug it in, it was not working. Brought it back to my local best buy, told them the issues, they even verified that it was not charging — and they sent it back.

I check the status online, daily, until it says “Being repaired” — when I get a call on my phone saying that it’s the repair person from Geek Squad and he has some questions for me. He sounds about 15 years old on the phone (good to know that my iPod is in good hands). He explains that I might be using a USB 2.0 charger (Miss Possible’s) and that I can only use Firewire to charge it. Fine. He says he found something wrong with the hard drive as well, and that it will be fixed. He also explained that the battery life seemed fine, so he did not fix that. “I’m shipping it out right now, so you should have it in 2 days,” he tells me. “Be sure to pad the box, please. The last time I received it, it was rattling around in a shoebox,” I warned him. “No problem, sir.”

A week goes by and I call my local best buy store. The inform me that it has shipped to the store, and they’ve had it for a few days. WHY?! I’m not sure. Probably because they didn’t have any padded boxes, so they shipped it to Best Buy to sneak underneath my radar. I rush over to the 23rd Street Best Buy, and bring it home. Still no syncing.

October, 2005:
Because I’ve been without an iPod for two months now, the gym has gotten terribly silent and I’ve been going nuts on my commute. I decide that I’m going to take matters into my own hands and try to fix it. But also, I want to at least experience some joy with it before I return it again. I re-install the software. I disk scan it. I format the hard drive using disk utility. I plug it in to other machines. I even found information on the web that explained that having music on an external drive might be causing the issue (a newly added feature to my setup, since I moved to NYC.) — but that turned out to be a false lead.

November, 2005
I can’t take it anymore. I’ve got 2GB filled of my 20GB hard drive, and I want this thing fixed. So I bring it back to Best Buy one last time, explaining that it was stlll not working. I even mentioned that I had spoken to one of their repair people, who explained that he had found something wrong and fixed it. The customer service people at Best Buy’s Geek Squad unit adamantly denied that a repair person would EVER call me. And if he did, it was one of the in-store repair people (which would further infuriate me, if I ever found out they were doing the repairs in store). I even brought with me a sheet of paper with the error messsages I was finding in my error.log file on my mac. THIS had to spark some repairs.

December, 2005
When I get it back, shipped to my office with a brand new hard drive, I’m convinced that the problem has been solved. WHen I get home, I plug it in.. SYNCING! Woo hoo! It even runs great (for about a week) — when problems start to crop up again. It started to crash again when I synced once or twice. Other times, I would hit play and it’d freeze up for 30-60 seconds, and then play. Something was definitely wrong with this new hard drive. Now, Best Buy has a “No Lemon Policy” which means if they cannot fix it after 3 attempts, they replace the product after you bring it back a fourth time. This was going to be trip #4 to the Best Buy store.

When I get there, I explain to the guy my numerous trips here to try to get it fixed, and he takes my iPod into the back to verify that there are problems with it. When he comes out, he says to me “This thing is fried. I’m not getting anything, when I plug it into the computer back there. I tried twice, and it just flickers and dies.” This was news to me.. I was just having the same intermittent issues I’ve always had. I tell him to try it on a mac, and he says the same thing. “This is often the problem with some of the older macs. The new batteries they put in, and I see here they did that for you a while back, are much worse and don’t hold their juice — causing them to die quicker. This looks like a bad hard drive.” “But they just replaced the hard drive last time”, I exclaimed. “Well, I’ll send it back and they’ll fix it” — “The hell you won’t,” I interrupt.

“They’ve had three times to try to fix this time. The first two were wasted efforts, because they flat-out told me there was nothing wrong. If they had actually done some investigation to try to figure this out, they would’ve seen that there were inherint issues with this piece of equipmenet. Now, this is the fourth time I’ve brought this back here, and according to the policy, this is a lemon.” “But it does not appear that you’ve had the same issue every time, so how can this be a lemon?” he asks. He clearly doesn’t get it. “There have been multiple problems with this, but the syncing issue has been consistent across the board. Last time they tell me the fix the syncing issue, but introduce new problems. How can I trust your team to work on this again?” “Fill out this form, sir, and I’ll send it back to them and they will then notify us that you’re eligible for a voucher for a new MP3 player. May I recommend the iRiver? I’ve had no problems with that.” Ahem. No. No, you can’t. “This will take another three weeks, as you probably know.” Of course I do.

He goes in the back room to fill out some paperwork, and I look up at the “menu” of repairs they do: $30 for anti-virus install; $50 for anti-virus and spyware; $89 for Operating Install; $119 for complete overhaul of system. I should stand outside the store and offer my services for less, this is highway robbery. Just then a girl walks up with her computer in a large duffle bag. She hands it to the guy, explaining that she just moved and her disk drive broke. She replaced the CD drive, connected it all up, but cannot get the Operating System to recognize it. It says “New Hardware Found” but she cannnot install the software because the software is on a CD (the frequent Windows Conundrum). She can’t even go online because she needs install the new software for her service provider, download the drivers from the Internet. I truly feel sorry for the girl.

The guy tells her that there’s not much that can be done, but yet he’ll look into it in the back. “But, when I called, someone told me they could just hook it up to antother computer and download the drivers onto this. It’d take 5 minutes they said,” the girl explained to the ‘friendly’ customer service person. “I’m not sure who told you that, but we can’t do that here. I’ll see what we can do, but it’s probably going to be about $100, and we’ll ahve to send it out to our repair facility to have them look into it.” As I sit here, I can immediately tell her how to solve the problem. Anyone who has ever re-installed the Windows OS, will know that after you wipe the drive clean, you have to install mscdex.exe in order to have the system recognize the CD Rom Drive. You can easily download it online. What she needs to do is go to Kinkos with a floppy disk, and download it from the Internet — then install that on her machine. Easy as pie. I couldn’t blatently tell her this while she was with the customer service guy, so I held my tongue.

But, this is just yet another example of this company’s incompetence. Want another? Check out this link, and look at the 8th item down that they’re selling “Spyware Installation.” Why am I not surprised?

Today:
So, where is my iPod now? Funny story. Last friday when I brought it in, the person said they would call me on Saturday to let me know if it shipped or not. They never did. They’ve told me this a few times before, and I’ve grown to learn they’re lying to me. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday go by.. and I check the status online. “At Best Buy store.” So, I call them up, asking why it hasn’t shipped yet. He says he doesn’t know. He goes into the backroom (or so he says) and says “It’s not here, so it must’ve shipped out.” 30 minutes later, when I check online it says “in route to service center.” VERY interesting. I hope that it’s more that, it shipped out Monday and that it didn’t update in the system — rather than find that it was sitting on a counter in the back, and he shipped it out that afternoon. I wouldn’t be surprised. Their incompetence is amazing.

Want to check on the status of my iPod? Here’s the link to the repair status. Take what it says with a grain of salt, I always do.