Why I will not buy at OTA

[Emma Jane Hogbin]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 01:34:50PM -0500, JoeHill wrote:
> BTW, what's with this hatred of OTA? I've seen that come up on this list a
> number of times, I can't say I've ever had a negative experience there. Their
> tech, Cezar (sp?), *seems* to know what he's doin'...

Fall of 2002 I bought a laptop from their Bay Street location. The extra
battery was back-ordered and they would call me when it came in. Two weeks
later I called the store and they had closed...not for the day, I mean
they'd closed. I called the location on College street and they had a
vague recollection of who I was and, oh yes, they did have an extra
battery that had been shipped over that was probably mine. I went to the
College St. store to pick it up as they weren't willing to ship it to me.

Then I bought a wireless router from them (within weeks of having bought
the laptop). I had to return it twice. The first two times the product was
defective (the ethernet cord popped because there wasn't a proper "snap"
in). The first time I returned the product I noticed they'd actually sold
me a product that had already been returned. There was writing on the
inside of the box and on the instruction manual. They refused to take the
product back. Fortunately the guy who'd sold it to me remembered me. They
yelled at *me* for having purchased a product that wasn't wrapped in
plastic (how the hell was I supposed to know?).

The laptop came with a dual boot CD Win2000/WinXP. I did a dual boot of
Debian/Win2000. I spent (literally) 30 hours with Acer tech support, the
wireless tech support and physically going back and forth to OTA trying 
to figure out the problem. I took the laptop back and asked them if they 
could help me figure out if it was a faulty card. They flat out refused to 
help. Sergio came close to offering assistance when he wasn't busy with new 
customers--but that was only after I refused to leave until someone
supported my brand new laptop. They said the only thing that I could do was 
ship the laptop back to Acer for a week and that I would have to sign an 
agreement saying that Acer was allowed to reinstall my OS and wipe all my 
data. I finally got the wireless card working under Debian. Turned out that 
although Acer and OTA both said that the WinXP drivers were for both XP and 
2000--they weren't. There was no Win2000 support for the wireless card.
The Acer techs *still* don't believe me.

During this time I realized that the new router had the same defect as the 
previous one. Instead of getting a third router with the same problem, I
asked for a different brand. The second brand was $50 cheaper, so I asked 
for the difference in price. They said no. So I asked
for a refund. They said no. I wasn't within the original 14 (or maybe it
was 7 days) from purchase. The owner told the clerk (in front of me) that
he was not to give me any money back. I was *livid* by this point. But 
seeing as the owner didn't give a shit, there was not much else that I
could do. I told them that I would *never* buy from them again, and I
would be sure to tell others never to buy from them again.

They wasted probably in the range of 30-40 hours of my time altogether. In
a 2-3 month span of time I'd spent close to $4000 with them and they were
not willing to give me $50 after having to return one of their products
TWICE. Nor were they willing to give me a full refund on a product that
was defective.

emma

-- 
Emma Jane Hogbin
[[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]]
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml