The devil is in the details

You have GOT to be kidding me (the finale of the Sony story)

Once upon a time, I sent off my Sony laptop to be repaired after having an undiagnosed problem. If you desparately to know about it, you could read about it here and this here. If you really, really wanted to know about it, you could even go back to the April archives and find out about the previous time that I sent it off to be repaired. Sadly for those of you obsessed with the status of my computer, I did not have a blog the very first time I sent that particular laptop back to Sony, so you cannot hear that story.

Anyway, I have been checking the "Repair Status" page quite often over the last week or so. Every time I checked (up until last night), the message said "Your computer is being repaired. Please check back later." And then.....I checked yesterday and was greeted with an estimate for cost of repairs on my computer and a request to call Sony to approve the charge for repairs. Oh...I called them all right, seeing as how the estimate was for considerably more than the computer had originally cost to purchase.

I talked to a very nice (and reasonable) man on the phone. I laughed as I told him the estimate, because the thought of paying that much to repair the computer was just that silly. His first response to the situation was "That can't be right!" When he later confirmed that yes, that was the correct estimate, he was laughing as well. I told him that there was no way that I was paying that much, and he agreed and made the arrangements to send the (dead) computer back to me. If I had said yes to the repairs, I think he would have yelled at me.

I think I had some points that I could have argued to get the estimate reduced: some of the repairs that they seemed to think were necessary were absolutely not needed. The things is, I would have been arguing down from a price that could have easily bought me three laptops.

Instead, I priced laptops from other companies and I think I've picked one out. I'm planning on taking the hard drive (which I know is fine, no matter what they say) and making it into an external hard drive. I am open to suggestions for what to do with the rest of it though. (Does anyone know where to get a sledgehammer?) I'm guessing that I'll have a new and considerably more functional computer by the end of this month, at which point I will be back with you a whole lot more often.

(That's the short version of what's going on...there's pretty much nothing else happening other than me being somewhat under the weather, my interviewing a bunch of high school students who want to go to Duke for undergrad and my having otherwise NOTHING happening.)

posted by Immunegirl @ 7:06 PM