Paranoid, Condescending, Defensive and Rude!
Sounds like Dick Cheney?
Hardly...
These adjectives rather describe recent customer service efforts from the people running The Computer Geeks, a home PC consulting service in NW Washington DC. They are anything but professional and seem OK on ripping off old ladies like my mother over the past three months.
Here's the backstory:
My mother's hard drive was sorely infected with viral malware. She called them, and the first tech that came out to her house made it worse. The next tech suggested replacing a faulty hard drive. Which they did...days later they called her to see how things were going. They asked her a lot of technical questions and naturally she wanted nothing more than to get this behind her so she said yes, yes and yes to all the mumbling bullett points they use for follow-up customer service. Which mean nothing b/c how many normal consumers know what deep scan data recovery or bit-map picture files really mean anyway?
My mother is 77. She emails and looks at pictures of the grandchildren. She has a really sweet Dell Studio 1550 that is just about as good as new. Sure, hard drives break. And you'd expect they'd replace it, install a fresh OS and restore the data.
Well, she started calling me back in early May about this new "This is not a valid copy of Windows" message suddenly appearing on the display everytime she booted. Hmmm...So I decided to pay her a visit this past week (June 21st) and investigate. Not only did the message now morph into a "This is a counterfeit copy of Windows" but I soon discovered that all the personal data she had from before was missing. Some folders, yes, but nothing inside them! Adding fuel to the fire, I recognized right away they didn't even bother to do a proper Windows 7 install either because I saw three instances of "Windows.old - xxxx" folders at the root of the C Drive.
I know my way around computers owing to 17 years experience as a storage professional. Anyone in the know will tell you, a Windows.old folder may indicate a newer version of Windows has been installed on top of an older one. Which leads me to believe they took an image of the "faulty" hard drive, removed it and replaced it with a new one, 'ghosted' that image onto the new hard drive and installed Windows atop the prior one as the final solution. What a sham! A fraudulent sham...
Seriously, these guys bilked my mother out of $300.00 before I had a chance to intervene. And when confronted, they refused to own the problem and blamed my mother for not letting them know about missing data earlier.
So let's back up here. I was able to prove they lost her data because the folders that held those pictures were actually on the new system too...but all the snaps were gone. Their excuse is that unused data will get overwritten if left alone long enough of time. I laughed. More smoke covering tracks. I wonder how many other older people in NW Washington they've milked $98.00 per with shoddy service. Not to mention, when confronted they had no sense to consider the consumer's POV. Perhaps they did make an error? Nope! Not them. Which led to condescension, defensiveness and downright beligerence.
This post is going to be reprinted on Angie's List as well as Craigslist with hopes that enough people will read it or worse, recognize they too were taken to the bank by this shoddy outfit. I am drafting a similar letter to the Better Business Bureau as well as the DC Business Licensing Board. If you have been unfortunate to be fraudelently duped by The Computer Geeks. Do complain. You are not alone. Your voice makes a difference.
At least Dick Cheney knows he's a crook...these guys haven't a clue which is worse!
All the best,
Paul Dorn
Storage Engineer
San Francisco, CA read more
