Does anyone else think this is nuts?

[WebmasterAlex]

I have a Lexmark Color Laser printer that I bought about 4 months ago for 400 dollars. It recently stopped working. They shipped me some parts that didn't fix it.
They said they would send a technician. Apperantly the technician for this area is out for a while. I have the figures from the reciept he left me. He started driving here at 657 am, arrived at 840. He was here untill 1056. He drove 79 miles. He used $590.00 worth of parts. It's not fixed! He had to order more parts and he's coming back Monday.
I think it might have been cheaper to replace the printer

 

[MeanLaureen]

IBM does that at work for us. Our registers and servers are IBM and when one starts going they just start replacing things one at a time until they've literally spent more money on parts than the computer is worth. Not to mention what they paid to airlift the parts from wherever they were to the Richmond Airport and have a courier drive them to us.

 

[arkansas mom]

Who sent the tech? The printer people or the place where you bought it?
That's just wrong .

 

[WebmasterAlex]

OH gosh I guess I should have said.. this is ALL covered under warranty, I'm not paying it!

 

[poohandwendy]

That is crazy, you would think the tech would check out the job and then place a call in to say "Hey, it would be cheaper to replace the printer" I mean, he still gets paid for his time and saves the company some money.

 

[alliecats]

Well, thank goodness it is under warranty because this sounds HIGH MAINTENANCE!!!

 

[Charade]

If they are like the company I work for, the customer price for parts is anywhere from 5 to 10 times what it costs the local service dept's budget.

Especially supplies like toner or developer.

 

[RUDisney]

In my company, we probably have about 40 HP servers. We bought a new one to replace an older one that was due for upgrade. My Network Administrator spent about 6 weeks going back and forth with our vendor and HP about making it work. They replaced a ton of parts. Some they shipped to us, others they sent a tech to install. Finally, he was on the phone with our vendor after the HP tech said that he was committed to working on this until it was finally fixed. My NA told the vendor to either replace the server willingly, or we'd be sending it back to them and requesting another unwillingly.

The vendor knows us and our history with other HP servers. He knows that we'd spent a ton of effort in trying to make it work. HP wasn't happy, but they replaced the whole server. Guess what? The server doesn't reboot half way through a tape restore and it doesn't arbitrarily switch from displaying English to something that resembles Chinese.

So, the moral to my long-windedness is that all of the tech companies do the same thing. This is the first server that we've ever gotten bad out of the box and we've been using them since they were Compaq, for about 15 years.

On another note, Lexmarks are usually not lemons in our experience. We've replaced most of our HP laser printers with Lexmarks because they've proven to be faster and more reliable for the money.

Good luck with your printer endeavor. You're right. It just doesn't make any sense.

 

[bicker]

Sounds like the repair worker sees a way to exploit the system: to get paid repeatedly, keeping the revenue coming in, keeping a good number of repair workers employed. If they just replaced printers when the repair would be too complicated, costly, or appears to have no staying power, then that would be akin to shipping the repair worker jobs off-shore, where the extra printers are manufacturered.

 

[WebmasterMaryJo]

Man, that's a lot of money for a printer & repair!

 

[HERSEY]

I'm glad your printer is still in warranty. Repair/service people sometimes seem to be an oxymoron. Hope they finally figure out what wrong.

 

[MsDisney23]

Nope doesn't add up to me either... I'm with you Alex just replace it with a new one!