it's hardly bloody fair!! fricking electronic stores!

Okay rant time..

my son brought a PS3 at Christmas time - so the thing is 4 months old.. well 3 weeks ago it wouldn't suck the discs in anymore, so we took it back to the shop, still under warrenty you see. The guy tells us that the little motor that sucks the discs in was broken and it would need to be sent away to be fixed, okay great, lets do that - okay maam thats an $80 bond. You have to be fucking kidding me?? i am NOT paying a bond for a bloody warrenty repair, you can get stuffed *rant rant* i get the explanation that they get some people who bring things in to get fixed and then refuse to pay for the repairs, well excuse me but you should really TELL me how much it will cost and if i consent to repairs before repairing it, and anyway its a warrenty repair, it won't cost me a thing. so i am not paying you the better part of $100. fine, that shit gets sorted and the thing gets sent away for repair, i get told it will take up to two weeks, but they are usually back within a week.

Three weeks later we get our beloved PS back.. the docket tells us the unit has been replaced with a "replacement unit" okay, so alarm bells start ringing.. replacement unit?? fuck that, i want MY PS back, fixed and all. so anyway next minuted i get this wail of despair from Mikes bedroom.. the thing doesn't work, it just shuts down when trying to load COD black ops, F1, NFS Shift, Skate 3 and freezes when trying to load Madden 10 - Red Faction won't load at all - but it will load and play several Ratchet and Clank games, as well as Midnight Club and NFS Hot Pursuit. I am not a happy camper - i call back the electronic store and inform them whats happened, they tell me to bring it back in tomorrow (i rung on closing time) so i then ask if the unit that ours was replaced with was new? er no.. its a refurnished unit, okay so how old is this unit? they can't tell me. okay so am i just being anal here expecting that my four month old PS3 be replaced with one of the same age or newer?? surely this isn't an unreasonable request, how do i know this "refurnished" unit isn't 2 years old already, and aside from that, IT DOESN'T BLOODY WORK!!

i would like to point out that all games worked in our playstation, we also hire alot of games on weekends and school holidays, we have never had this problem before.

So i guess i'll find out more tomorrow after work when i take it back.. what pisses me off is that it'll probably be away another 3 weeks and i probably won't be getting back our 4 month new PS back either.

It's not fair.. it wouldn't be fair if this happened to anyone, but it seems even less fair that this has happened to a 14 year old boy who delievered bloody newspapers 3 nights a week, which took no less than 2 hours a run, for a year in order to buy this PS3.

Poor Mike.

I am sure you can take your grievance to trading standards. Insist on action and compensation. It's a hassle I know - but probably the only way to beat these idiots into acceptance that they have a responsibility to the children they target for their product sales.

Well the electronic store was really good about it all actually, they send away products to a repair agent for Sony.. so the manager of the store is pretty upset they've sent us a second hand console (not to mention a second hand, broken, console) So now we wait while it's once again sent away, i have the serial numbers of our original PS and everything.

Ah that sucks.

One thing to point out though.. In situations with companies such as Sony, LG, Samsung, etc..

Refurbished does not necessarily mean used in the sense that it has been actually used. Any time an electronics item has been returned opened it cannot be resold as new, at least here it can't be. So generally what happens is it gets shipped back to the manufacturers' "refurb" center where it is tested, repaired (if need be) and then repacckaged with all the original accessories and manuals, etc. Then they will use those refurbished units as in your case warranty replacements or they sell them off to 3rd party vendors who in turn sell them to the end consumer, but they are marketed as being refurbished. Fact is, that 4 month old PS3 that you had could have been manufactured as long as a year or even 2 prior to you purchasing it. In some cases that refurbished unit could have been originally manufactured even sooner than the one you originally purchased.. no way to tell. I find it really odd that some games work while others do not. Does he have a friend with a PS3 that he can check his disks in? Another thing... by sending you one of thsoe factory refurbished units the way they did.. it actuallly does cut down on the time it takes to return a system to you. Believe it or not.

Unfortunately it seems you may have gotten one that somehow slipped through the cracks and something was missed. It also seems that from your story they are making every effort to satisffactory resolve the matter within the guidelines they have to work with. So I dont see how crying to some bureaucratic agency at this point serves anyone any good.

So wow.. both the lesson of working for something and how life can sometimes be frustrating all at once.. Awesome!

You know, the electronic store were really good, it wasn't really their fault, they don't test items that come back "fixed" and they send everything away to a 3rd party to be fixed.

I didn't know that about refurbed units, thats interesting, and lessens some of the pissed offness i was feeling. His games all work, we took them into the store when we took it back, and they tested the discs.. work fine, the unit was doing the same thing when they were testing it also, some games worked, some not..

i got an email today saying that the unit has been replaced and is on its way back, so they don't really explain what was wrong with it. (bummer)

and as for crying about it..it's what i do, it makes me feel better. i'm over it now, as long as we get back a PS3 in perfect working order, thats all that matters at the end of the day.

Oh, I wasn't suggesting there was anything wrong with you being upset about the console not working. I would have been too. I was simply trying to explain the process. The fine print of the warranty most likely says somewhere "repair or replace", most do. If you really want a nightmare... try to get an Apple product fixed, ha!
I was suggesting that contacting some bureaucratic agency to register a complaint probably wasn't warranted as the store seemed to be doing everything in their power to reconcile the situation. After reading your latest post I'd say they probably went beyond what they had to do.

it's interesting you brought up Apple, a few days ago i was seriously considering buying an Iphone, but decided to go with a samsung galaxy s.. we only really have two big player cell providers over here in NZ and only one of them stocks the Iphone, and of course, its the provider i'm not with that stock it.. so i was listening to vodaphone go on about how fab the iphone is and how once you've had one you'd never go back etc. and i was listening to telecom tell me the galaxy is as good as the iphone and because i was SUCH a good customer (lol) they've give me $250 off the phone.. anyway.. i did something i've never done before, i waited! *gasp!* I went home and decided to do a bit of looking about online, whats funny is that i didn't really have to go any further than facebook, where 3 of my friends have had major probs with their iphones, and 1 friend is on her 3rd iphone and is so over Apple giving her the run around.

I'm a week into the galaxy and couldn't be happier.. of course you always get people that love one product and hate another, i've heard some bad stuff about android.. but hey, i've also heard bad stuff about microsoft, but i still use that everyday.

anyway blah blah blah what i'm trying to say is.. i'm glad i didn't buy the iphone, and i didn't realise that Apple were so terrible about fixing/replacing shit.

I have read good things about the Galaxy class phones and tablets by Samsung. I have become so brand loyal to HTC I will probabvly never own anything else though. My current smartphone, the Evo, is my first try with Android, and so far while not all that impressed, I dont have many complaints either. It is certainly no where near the business phone that a Windows Mobile 7 phone is, but it does most of what I need it to do. My choice wasn't so much "Awesome, I can get an Android phone" but more that I changed carriers and the Win 7 phones they offered were crap. The carrier was what I was wanting though. Sprint is the only provider in the US that offers truly unlimited data. While others say it is unlimited.. and it is up to 2GB, after that they throttle down your data speeds. Whereas Sprint doesn't. Why pay for 4G and only end up with 2G after you exceeed the 2GB per month? Crazy!
Let me know how the Galaxy works out for you. First hand reviews are often a lot more telling than a C-NET producer who only has their hands on the phone for 5 minutes.

I hate Apple with passion. Over priced hardware and terrible customer service. Listening to anyone talk about how great Apple is reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. Which is a must see for anyone that hasn't. Their reasons for buying anything Apple are pretty much the same as the ones in the movie for watering crops with Gatorade (they called it some other brand name of course). =)