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Discolor Online

Weblog of the sweetest person you never want to piss off.

 

A Tale of Two Repairmen

As chronicled elsewhere, Chez Ronin has needed a bunch of fixes in recent days.

Repair Story One: On October 22, after being unable to find a reputable washing machine repair service that would actually service MY area or MY machine, I broke down and scheduled a repair from Sears. I had to wait another week but I had an appointment and a confirmation number, I offered up my credit card as a guarantee, I thought it was a done deal.

Monday I waited around all day for the repair guy. Nothing. My "window" was from 1:00pm to 5:00pm and I finally called at 5:45pm, whereupon I was told they were "running a little late" and I should "give them another 10 or 15 minutes." At 7:45pm I received a call from a guy with a thick accent telling me that they "weren't going to be able to make it" and "would have to reschedule." Babbling excuses about two guys hadn't shown up for work, blah blah whatever. It was extremely unclear whether or not they were actually going to call ME to reschedule or if I was going to have to call them. Yesterday, I defaulted to calling them.

When I called the person on the other end of the line tried to claim "no one was home" when they tried to make the repair call. I strongly objected, reiterated that I'd called them and had been told they were "running late" and that TWO HOURS after I made that call, I'd gotten a call that no one was coming... I was home for every minute of that alleged service window and more, thank you very much. "We will have to reschedule," said the guy. "For TODAY, right? Because I've already been waiting a week since I made the appointment..." No appointment yesterday but he did book me for today. 8:00am to noon, he said.

It's 11:45am and I've still seen no one. Still no idea if I'll be able to wash clothes at the end of all this. Status: Unresolved and unsatisfied

Repair Story Two: Meanwhile, as I was on a kick yesterday, I called Comcast about my upstairs reception problem. They were very nice, booked me a repair guy for that same afternoon! The repair person showed up promptly within the window I was told, was professional and pleasant, and fixed the problem by replacing my old cable box with a new, smaller, totally digital box. Just that easy. Well... not entirely that easy as we'd had the upstairs TiVo on a serial connection and the new box didn't have a serial port. Removing the old cable box also lost me a plug (as one of our devices was plugged into a power relay on the cable box). I had to get another IR controller and move everything to a new powerstrip to make it all work like it was supposed to (which involved moving some heavy things around to get to the appropriate outlets, too) but that's not Comcast's problem and it was nothing I couldn't handle. We're now premium channel AND TiVo-enabled upstairs. By this morning Comcast had called back to see if my problem had been fixed to my satisfaction. Status: Resolved and satisfied

Bonus Repair Story: My anti-technology field continues to cause havoc with my recent Miva purchase. The Miva troubleshooter called me back yesterday and we tried to tweak my settings to get Synchro working, to no avail. We changed settings, uninstalled, reinstalled, restarted, uninstalled, redownloaded, reinstalled... no love. Even though we haven't solved the problem, the Miva people get big points for effort, professionalism and politeness. They called me to make sure someone had contacted me about my issue since it hadn't been marked resolved and had been going on since the weekend, plus the main troubleshooter was very reassuring that I could call back with updates as I tried some of the fixes and that I didn't have to worry about being bumped around... he was going to stick with me through this until it was sorted out. Plus, they all spoke clear English, which was SUCH a relief after dealing with Sears and Microsoft. Status: Unresolved but satisfied, so far.

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