Something about walking into a store with a broken product in hand and walking out with a shiny new one! It's great! I mean sure the feeling of not knowing what's wrong or even if you can get it replaced is tough to swallow, then once the guy in the black shirt emerges from the back room with a new item in hand all is well. *cue the birds*I had the unfortunate experience of putting this scenario to the test recently. It's been a while since I've been able to use a trade I learned called wordsmithing! But in true customer service fashion I was ready for the product replacement battle! Check my wordsmith resume, I've got history! My craft was first discovered back when I could call Nike, tell em some stitching on my shoes were coming out, nad in a couple days they'd send you a box to send your shoes in and boom! In less than a month you'd have a BRAND NEW pair of Nikes, similar or better than what you sent in. Life at Adam State was great knowing I had a new pair of sneaks either on the way or being processed for approval pretty much at all times!
Then came the good ole Sidekick! Oh the memories! This is where the craft was perfected! Since it's inception the sidekick seemed to be bundled with issues. Sidekick 1,2, and 3 included, none of these were immune to faulty production. I had to make frequent calls to T-Mobile! Not only me, db can vouch that this was nothing out of the ordinary! Between us we probably had around 40+ sidekicks from all generations pass thru our hands. And we learned the lingo, let's get straight to the point! We would call tmo tell them we've already done the soft reset, the hard reset, the press the letter on the keyboard then reset, the resend my system file on the backend reset, we did it all ourselves! We wouldn't even want to waste our time with the Tier1 customer service group, Tier2 also for that matter. Just transfer me directly to the Sidekick Data Group! After repeating everything for about 15mins a new sidekick would be enroute. A great feeling and a job well done (until it had to go back in the coming weeks(days)!
The mastered craft was again tested when we got our Blackberrys and needed to swap them out for whatever reasons. No worries though, we had experience with the tmo folks! Even though they seemed to tighten the ropes on product replace procedures, the proper wordsmithing would net positive results.
It had been a while since I've needed to put these tools to the test. So when my iphone began to randomly reset and lock up I knew a trip to the Apple store was required. Apple has always been good about standing behind their products, I've had to swap out an ipod or 2 (or 5) in my time (sans replacement plan). No worries! I wasn't worried about the phone swap really, I've had it for under a year and recently the phone was locking up expectantly and then the battery all of a sudden dumped and wouldn't hold a charge. With this ammunition I headed to my local AS, wordsmith in tow just in case. A quick appointment/session with DJ at the Genius Bar and then it happened! The guy in the black shirt coming from the back room peeling the wrapping off a new born iphone!! Ahhh.....
UPDATE: i think i spoke too soon.....
