Repair Community Horror Stories

Repair Community Horror Stories

Has a customer's device ever been stolen from your shop? Have you ever spent hours working on a device only to find the device is beyond repair? We wish the best for all our customers and hope nothing like this ever happens to you, but everyone seems to have a repair "horror story" of their own. Oftentimes sharing stories of defeat can help members of the Repair Community learn from the mistakes of others while at the same time building a stronger sense of camaraderie. So we asked the Repair Community: What's the worst experience you've had since starting your repair shop? We hear your horror stories every day, from the terrible run-ins with customers and those repairs that just never seem to go right. We thought we had heard it all.. but we had no idea. The responses we received were even better (or.. worse?) than we expected...check it out!   Matt let us know his story of a disgruntled (and by the sounds of it, confused) customer. "A customer claimed we had caused her WiFi to stop working properly after an iPad 2 repair. We always test the WiFi to make sure the cable isn't damaged, and when she brought it in the store it picked up our WiFi right away. She claimed it would drop so I kept it for further testing. I used her iPad outside my office and it never dropped WiFi so I called to tell her there must be a problem with her home WiFi. She started saying I was calling her a liar and there couldn't be any problem and put her daughter on the phone to tell me the same thing (even though I told her I believed that it wasn't working in her home), and requested I come out to her house for free to see what the problem was. After 30 minutes of repeating the same thing I told her I couldn't be of anymore help as we found the WiFi to be functioning great. She then started a Facebook hate campaign and was promptly banned from my Facebook page and from doing any future repairs though us."   John told us about a strange run-in he had with a customer over a Dell computer he sold them. "Since I own a computer repair shop, I sold a Dell in pristine condition. About a month later, the customer brought it back for service, sat it down on the floor shop - while my back was turned & busy soldering on an iPod - the computer was full of roaches and even had a roach motel stuck on the side. Needless to say, they threatened me over the phone and had a deputy present when they arrived. They claimed the roaches came from my shop! Cop told them, 'He has the right to refuse service to anyone.' "   Matt Y. commented on our Facebook page with his horror story, and we unanimously agree this one might the worst. "I had my store robbed and 17 laptops got stolen. I had to deal with data loss, replacement laptops, customers got new laptops even if they were totally dead, and people were just being ungrateful considering everything we were trying to do. Eventually the dust settled but we had to buy new MacBook Pro's, etc. This experience set us back over $7,000. Now my office is insured for property of others, liability waver has been updated, full security cameras, double dead bolt door, back room with steel door for all electronics, better alarm system. Protect your store!"   Bryan told us about his experience handling a very nice but slightly difficult customer.. "I had a customer, a very nice lady, who came to me after another local tech "fixed" her iPad. I could tell he did shoddy work and was in agreement with her being upset. The iPad had no plastic screen bezel, the LCD was discolored from too much heat and the volume switch had phantom presses from the screws being over tightened. I corrected all the issues and had her back like new. A few weeks later she calls and tells me the screen is not working correctly. I tell her to bring it back and I'll have a look. She comes in with a BROKEN digitizer! I was like, here's your problem pointing to the shattered digitizer. She tells me that it was acting up before the break (mmhum). I replaced the digitizer at cost just to retain a good relationship with the customer. Then she calls another few weeks later with the same issue. Digitizer not working correctly. Brings it back and it was cracked again! No breaks that time, charged a full price repair but, I did put it in an otter style case for free."   Louis told us all about his terribly unfortunate time during Hurricane Sandy. "How do I choose? The time I got flooded during Hurricane Sandy, had to pay all the expenses of being in business but have a week of no income because a power plant three blocks from my store exploded? Or the time I had to fix over 150 tickets, ship 1800+ orders over a 1 day time period with three employees to catch up because no one outside of NYC cared about Hurricane Sandy and why it might delay their order? Or what about the time $14,000 of parts were stuck in Chinese customs for six weeks, causing me to have to replace all of them, while simultaneously bleeding $$ from Hurricane Sandy?"   Martin's iPhone 4 home button repair turned into a dreaded 6 hour troubleshooting session and blue coil repair. "Changed a home button on an iPhone 4 more than a year ago. Everything worked, but the iPhone would not get any carrier signal. It just went from "no signal" to "searching" in a loop forever. I did several things to try to fix this. I think I used about 5-6 hours before I found the blue coil issue on YouTube. I tried to solder it 2 times and the 3 time it worked! What a pressure release after that!"   Thanks to everyone who participated and sent us their repair horror stories! You guys had some really great responses and everyone here at eTech Parts enjoyed reading them. If you haven't already joined the growing Repair Community, you can head on over to Facebook and LIKE our page to get the scoop and let your voice be heard. Let us know what you think and if you missed out on this discussion on Facebook, feel free to share your story in the comments below. While we love hearing from the Repair Community it's even better to see members of the Repair Community engaging and discussing topics with other members and technicians and business owners. So head over to Facebook to join the Repair Community and stay tuned for more from eTech Parts.