ABS Computers Inc ABS Bravado

I began having serious problems just after my 1-year anniversary data. Below, I reproduce my recent complaint and follow-up e-mails.

In retrospect, I realize that it was a big mistake to buy a computer from a company that contracts out its repairs rather than doing them itself.

Staff at the contract company has varied in knowledge and congeniality. Until the most recent problem, described below, the computer had gotten fixed but often with considerable time and hassle.

Myrecent e-mails to ABS, in reverse order:

Aug 30 2005

Yesterday, one of your people (I don't remember his name) phoned in response to the message I sent two days ago (repeated below).

At first he seemed pleasant and conciliatory, but as the conversation proceeded, it soon became apparent that, claiming he had read my entire message, he had read with an eye to arguing with me, not to figuring out how to work with a customer to solve a problem. (At one point he asked what I wanted; when I said that I would have expected ABS to have suggestions but that one choice--as I had written in the e-mail he supposedly read--was to replace my computer, he responded in a cold, accusatory tone: "I know where you're going with this," as though he had sand-bagged me. This kind of tone and variants on it had become typical of the call.) Increasingly, he kept interrupting me in mid-sentence, then accused me of interrupting and not listening to him. While claiming to have read my letter, he kept raising points as though I had never spoken to them. He never responded to my repeated queries about why 3 supervisors had never followed up on previous calls. And so on and on.

The subtext of his message was that although ABS was sorry to have an unhappy customer, the company was giving no credence to my complaints and taking no responsibility.

When I finally realized this call was nothing but an endless series of arguments, I told him I'd had enough and said good-by.

I hadn't expected a return call to my e-mail, and I would have preferred none at all to the pretense of concern this fellow presented. After all my previous wasted time and frustration, I didn't need ABS to assign a kind of enforcer verbally to strong-arm me about my own shortcomings and inadequacies.

Before this call, I had already reconciled myself to having to throw away this computer the next time anything goes wrong that would demand my spending extensive time trying to fix it.

What good could you possibly imagine would come of treating an already dissatisfied customer this way? What kind of outfit assigns customer relations to someone hell-bent on justifying his company (and in a sense himself) and on reinforcing the already clear attitude that the customer should expect no satisfaction from his company?

I expect this fellow will explain how he was right and I was totally unreasonable. Please don't tell me about it or sic him on me again--I'm not interested.

__________________________________________________

(copy of my Aug. 28 2005 message)

ABS has abandoned me. Here is the history behind whatever is in your files.

Since spring, I have had 2 hard drives fail, the computer has overheated (which finally required me to send it to 2net, where they put on a new motherboard and higher power fan), and then, within a couple of days of getting it back, windows crashed and couldn't be restarted. I used an Acronis backup to restore my configuration, and that was fine for a few days until the computer crashed again. In fact a 2nd hard drive of my own that I had installed a few months earlier, that had been perfectly fine until then, and that I had used for extensive backups, was somehow damaged. (Fortunately, before I sent the overheating computer to 2net, I had further backed everything up to a USB hard drive, including an Acronis recovery image.

After some back and forth, 2net decided my 2nd HD was defective and arranged to ship a replacement. I was sure this would take several days (even though I pleaded that after all my problems 2net should expedite this shipment), and I couldn't wait (I use the computer for work, and I had just gotten a new contract), so I bought a new hard drive myself, copied the Acronis backup to it, reformatted my 2nd drive, backed up everything there again, and went to work.

A couple of days later the computer refused to boot because, it said, there was no ntldr even though when I booted to DOS I could see the file on the root drive, and even though I renamed that file and then copied to the root drive a good one from my laptop computer.

When I called 2net, a rep spent an hour on the phone trying to do a few things and spending a great deal of time with one specific effort that involved DOS. After an hour or so said I wasn't willing to keep going through this trial-and-error confusion with DOS and that it seemed I, for all my mediocre tech knowledge, knew DOS better than he. (I didn't need him to know it better than I; I needed him, much earlier, to acknowledge that he had reached the limit of his knowledge in this area and to put me on to a tech who knew what was needed.) He complained that I didn't appreciate that he had spent a whole hour of this time on the phone with me. I pointed out that I was the customer, not getting paid for all my time, and that he was supposed to be helping me and getting paid for that hour or whatever other time he put in. I said I wanted a supervisor to call me.

We hung up. After some fiddling around on my own, I created a boot floppy with an ntldr file, and lo! the computer booted to Windows. It used the ntldr on the floppy, couldn't find the boot.ini there, and went to my hard drive for it.

Later that day, another 2net rep, with whom I had spoken, I think, the previous day, phoned. He said Susan was busy, would call me later, but in the meantime wanted me to speak with this tech. He urged me to reinstall Windows. When I asked why the computer would boot from the hard drive with a floppy but not with the ntldr on the hard drive, he insisted that either the HD (remember this was brand new) was defective or the Acronis backup file was.

I had spent so much time on the computer's problems in recent months that I was unwilling to take even more time for a trial solution which might or might not work--and if it did, might even mean more time to reinstall all my software.

I was beginning to wonder if something was fundamentally wrong with the computer--esp. whether the months-long stretch of overheating had weakened any components. I explained that I was at the point one gets with a car that keeps needing repairs: I wasn't prepared to keep pouring in good money (or in this case, time) after bad. I also said that while I was sure he truly believed the ntldr problem was a result of one of the 2 causes he had cited, I had been around computers long enough to know nobody can every be absolutely certain about what is causing a problem.

When I didn't hear from Susan (and I still haven't), I called ABS and left a message for a supervisor with a good time to call. A very pleasant ABS supervisor did call. I explained everything, said I was looking for some solution from ABS for what increasingly appeared to be a fundamentally flawed computer, and that perhaps this meant replacing the computer though I was open to other possibilities that would not cost me more time. She seemed to hear my concerns, agreed that the overheating could have caused serious problems, thought it was reasonable to send a tech to my home for diagnosis and possible repair, and promised she would call Susan at 2net and phone me back the next day about what might be done.

I never heard from her. I called ABS, left a message, didn't hear. (You have this infuriating system of not putting callers through to people directly, regardless of the caller's plight.) I called again and left a message for any supervisor. Eventually, someone called when I was out, left a message that she would try to phone me again the next day.

I never heard from anyone at ABS or 2net again. Over the following days I experimented with changes to my configuration and somehow got the computer to boot correctly from the HD. (So much for "it has to be one of two causes...")

I keep waiting for the next thing to go wrong with this computer. I don't trust that it will get fixed, or that if it does something else won't happen after that. I don't know if any computer components are damaged from the overheating, and if so I wouldn't know how to tell which ones.

It is very clear to me that I made a mistake taking a risk on ordering from ABS, a company I had never heard of. Annoying as it is, the various failures of the computer are not the real issue. Rather, I find I am dealing with a company that does not stand behind its product (that my one-year anniversary date had passed just before all these problems began is an easy legal out but not an effective customer-relations attitude) and that cannot be counted on to follow through.