Did I Win?

First, a short story: A few years ago I was dining at a restaurant and I ordered a special salad. When I received it, I found out that one of the more ‘exotic’ ingredients (listed in the menu) was missing. When I asked the waiter why the salad was missing that ingredient, he told me that they were out of it. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that when I ordered?’ I asked. In reply I was told something that until today I keep encountering at many of the services in my country: ‘We did not think you would notice’.

This story is only a sample of the many times I have encountered this phenomena in a wide range of services. From restaurants to electronic stores, many of them first assume that the client is an idiot who doesn’t really know what he wants. It’s only when the client finds the service faulty that the service ‘patches up’ the problem. Sometimes people call this the ‘successful’ method, which means that the service provider attempts to bill the customer for something that they did not provide for extra money, and if the client picks up on it, only then the service provider removes the bogus item from the bill.

Today I once again dodged the ‘successful’ method. Long story short: My PSU was faulty, I handed it over for repairs, after which I had received a ‘new’ PSU. After that running complex applications (games, mostly) made my PC crash, which was horrific, because it was difficult for me to pinpoint the problem, especially since the PSU I had received was brand ‘new’.

It took me a few days to come up with a test to make it certain that the problem was either the PSU or my Motherboard. Given that the PSU was just replaced, the odds of the problem lying else ware were small. So today, after wasting days trying to figure out the cause of the problem (with the tests to back it up) , I returned to the store and once again requested that my PSU be replaced. The lab guy first checked the PSU with his equipment asserting that it is perfectly functional. Doubts formed and grew in my mind, but I have not given up yet. I have elaborated about my agonizing journey for recreating the problem and finding the cause. Luckily for me, the lab guy listened and called the importing company. After a long conversation he finally came up to me and told me that I was right. They have sent me a PSU that was returned by another customer because of the exact same problem and was tagged as ‘new’. I could see how the lab guy felt bad about it, even though it wasn’t his or the store’s fault. The importing company had decided to send this to another customer in the hopes that the customer is stupid enough to order a powerful PSU without the hardware to fully utilize it. Were I just surfing the web and reading my mail I might have never find out that the PSU is faulty.

So now I am to receive a new PSU. Even if everything turns out OK and my computer will run flawlessly for another year or two… what next? What if another hardware component fails? Would I have to go through this cat and mouse ordeal again? Did I win?