From: Niall O Broin (nobroin at domain sced.esoc.esa.de)
Date: Fri 28 May 1999 - 12:41:53 IST
Not being in the country I haven't read this myself, but a friend has told me
that a disgruntled customer has just been awarded 600 squid in the small claims
court on foot of a claim against Gateway for the crappiness of their technical
support - I take it his argument was that his purchase supposedly included in the
price access to technical support and he didn't regard waiting on hold forever
before being connected to a clueless gombeen as "technical support".
Anyone have more details, or a URL for any reference to this in any of the Irish
on-line papers ? If it's true and is as I've described it, it must surely open
a very embarassing, not to mention expensive, floodgate in Gateway's direction.
Kindest regards,
Niall O Broin
UNIX Network Administrator nobroin at domain esoc.esa.de
Ground Systems Engineering Department Ph./Fax +49 6151 90 3619/2179
European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany
P.S. The person who told me this is a former Gateway customer. Years ago he bought
a PC from Gateway (a 66MHz pentium - that's how long ago) and the monitor died
not long after the warranty expired. Gateway wouldn't fix it - told him they
didn't do out of warranty repairs and to take it to a third party. At that time
there was exactly one company doing repairs of that nature - some crowd in Bray.
They took a look at it and said that they couldn't fix it because they couldn't
get the necessary parts.
To make a long story short Gateway settled with him shortly before they were due
in court - new monitor and paid his lawyer's bills. The basic point was apparently
that there is a reasonable expectation that an expensive consumer good will last
for a reasonable length of time, and that includes the expectation that it will be
possible to repair it after its warranty has expired.
P.P.S. Apologies to anyone who's received this multiple times - I'm having problems
posting to ILUG this past couple of days.
P.P.P.S. Update - my friend heard it on the Marion Finucane radio show.
P.P.P.P.S. Yes, a little off topic. But we did run Linux on the aforementioned P66
long before Linux was profitable or popular, as they say. I rang Gateway support
about a hardware problem and that was interesting - plaintive cry of "but why can't
you open the control panel ?"
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