Saga of the laptop that almost died...

My laptop crashed a couple of days ago. Damn, it was a horrible, infuriating experience.

Actually, it didn't exactly crashed... it was more like.. going to crash.. the hard disk was working doubly hard and making loud, protesting noises, and the whole laptop was just vibrating. All my work is in there, I can't possibly let it die on me... so I backed up the data, like any good ex-engineer would do, and sent the unit in for service.

The service centre was great, but what I didn't count on, was the miscommunication/misunderstanding between an irate customer and a technically very sound engineer. I asked for an express service... c'mon, it's month end + fiscal year end, there's quite a lot of work to do! All I needed was the hard disk changed...

The phone conversation went something like this:

Engineer: Hello, can I speak to Ms Kee Jillian Kee please?
Me: Yes this is Jillian speaking.
Engineer: Hi Ms Kee, I'm so-and-so calling from the service centre. You've just sent in a laptop right?
Me: Yes I did.
Engineer: Ms, I'm calling to tell you that although you asked for express service, but we may need a longer time to resolve your problem.
Me: Er... ok, so roughly how long would you need?
Engineer: Er... It depends on your hard disk size... it's a 40Gb right?
Me: Think so...
Engineer: It would take about 2 hrs for us to scan the disk, if we need to replace the disk, we need some time to do that and reload the OS for you.
Me: Ok... I need it urgently, can't you just replace the disk? It spins very loudly and it is quite possible that the disk is spoilt.
Engineer: Ah Ms, I cannot just replace like that. I need to troubleshoot and check. If the disk is really spoilt, I will change it for you. If I can't find any errors, I will just send the laptop back to you.
Me: What do you mean just send it back to me? If you can't find the problem, what should I do? No workarounds?
Engineer: If there is no problems, we will just send it back to you... Ms, from the technical aaspect, I cannot give you a workaround now before checking the disk!
Me: Yes I understand, I am not asking you to give me a workaround right this minute! But just pointer for you, never tell customer that you would return the goods to them because you can't find the problem!

Anyway, the call went on for a while, and it got me irritated. Next up, a fellow colleague had to remark that I am teh kind of customer that vendors hate... shit! I was already irritated, and yet someone can come and tell me such things!

I finally got my laptop back... almost 5 hours later... so happy... and then found out that the windows edition was loaded wrongly!! We use "Windows XP Professional edition", but it was reloaded with XP Home. Darn... after calling them again, they refered me to somewhere else... to reload the OS to XP Professional... and that, my friend... took another day... all in all, I was out of action without my laptop for 2 blahdy days... see la see la? Sometimes the customer service sucks big time...

Anyway, the laptop is back now... and here I am blogging again!