About a year ago, I was called out to do field service. When I got to the lady's house and was let in, the first thing I noticed was the smell of gunpowder. The second, the double barreled 12-gauge shotgun lying on the couch. Third, the big gaping hole in the side of her computer. (It was one of those Macs where the CPU and monitor are in the same housing.)
I looked at her. She was a little grey haired woman, around 60 or so. Had she? Not possible. Still, I had to ask.
Me: "Did you shoot...?"
Customer: "Yes, I got a little mad at it. They told me I couldn't hurt it, but I think they were wrong. Can you salvage anything?"
I mumbled something about not being a Mac tech and told her I would send one out as soon as I could. Then I burned rubber out of there.
About a month later, my boss called me in; he had the woman on hold. She had apparently complained that I was not competent and that I had lied when I said I would send out a competent Mac tech -- or perhaps I just hadn't been able to find anyone competent working for us. I filled him in. He paused for a second, picked up the phone, and said, "Ma'am? Did you put a shotshell into your computer? ... Uh huh...I'm sorry, ma'am, we really can't...well, no.... I'll try to send one out.... Nice doing business with you...." He hung up, looked at me, and said, "You think any of our Mac techs will go?" I shook my head. "Me neither."
We heard from her again last week, when my boss told me that the woman had called up to cuss me out, saying not only was I a "young whippersnapper" but also a liar, since one of our competitors had fixed her computer just fine, even fixing the little scratches and stuff on the monitor glass. That sounded fishy, so I went over and talked with the techs. After a case of canned drinks and a few bags of junk food, I wormed the whole story out of them. Apparently, about the only salvagable part was the hard drive (which the buckshot had missed), so they took it out, went out and bought a whole new computer, slapped the hard drive in, and presented it to the lady as her repaired computer -- of course charging her an arm and a leg.
