I Want The Last Two Hours of My Life Back, LG

I won't explain why I had to complain like this, it's all in the post (and yes I know there are at least two mistakes in there and yes each one is liek a steak hamered in to my chast but the sight helpfully does not let you edit these thangs.)


http://www.lgblog.co.uk/2010/01/lg-customer-service/

It begins...


 

You know it says something about the world today when the only way you can actually reach a major company is via their blog. Ok, so maybe that sounds too much like the deranged rantings of someone who is trying to sound so devastatingly cool that 90% of what they come out with is simply 'Facebook is too commercial nowadays' even when the conversation was actually about the price of timber in the Sudan or the hazards of lions in Scotland... or is that the other way r... never mind. What it does say something about is the company itself.

I am going to take a short break to give you a heads up here, this comment is going to be long, it is going to get seriously wordy and likely go off topic and delve into the realms of robotics, the potential for creating sentient potatoes and the precise meaning of that most hideous of political terms 'Quango', because honestly I have no idea and despite it being explained to me in length a dozen times I still insist it was a character from Banjo Kazooie.

Now, to the matter in hand, I have a pair of Flatron W2242S monitors which up 'til recently have served me beautifully (or as beautifully as a monitor can for anyone without a bizarre fetish that leads to them having a love affair with a laptop and getting banned from PC World). Not long ago however one developed a fault, namely a horizontal line of what looks like something somewhere between dead pixels and screen burn. So I set about digging out the guarantee from the mound of boxes in the garage, thinking that it would be the most difficult and tedious part of the process, if I knew then what I know now I think I would have simply built myself a small nest in amongst the boxes and gone into a catatonic state...

Without wishing to sound melodramatic or to overstate things too greatly... your website is going to bring about the destruction of mankind. I'll develop on that shall I? You know how the evil genius supervillain types from the world of Hollywood always have some sort of back story involving a 'lab accident', or being wronged in some way by a traffic warden that inevitably leads to them hollowing out a volcano and declaring their undying vendetta on mankind by repeatedly attempting to kill British agents? Well... sorry I've now gone so off topic I've lost myself. To put it another way: your website is bad. If LG were say, a small florists or pet dealership that also sold small amounts of fishing tackle and looked very much to passersby like some kind of syndicate run drug front then having a bad website could be overlooked. However LG (which I take it stands for 'Lots Good!') is a major technology company, you can build a phone that goes online and yet you can't manage to build something that 13 year old girls the world over manage to create and fill with photos of puppies and pink things at various degrees of cuteness. See, I warned you this would be long and largely off topic didn't I...

I first sent an email not quite as lengthy as this comment (but vastly more surreal ((on that note I am no longer going to call this a comment but an 'essay', no wait, a 'treatise')))...to the email address listed in the guarantee book only to get an email back moments later that despite being very courteous was deftly to the point (yes I know it was an automated response but I like to treat all emails as if they are from real people, it makes the world a more interesting place and often leads to lengthy debates with web servers at 2 in the morning)...stating that the email address didn't exist, or rather no longer existed. So I set about looking for another on your flash riddled website, my heart sank (seriously not an overstatement this time) when I found that your support had no public email address and that I would need to use the contact form. Now I am aware that this treatise has already become far too long and delved far too deeply into the realms of ridiculousness, so I will endeavour not to explain precisely how much I loathe contact forms but needless to say I was not much pleased at the prospect of shortening my email to just 1000 characters, after all you would not have given Shakespeare just a 1000 words to let him tell you how devious Scottish people are, would you?

Ok, back on topic, if I can actually recall what I was on about... err...

The website, yes. Right, focus... I filled in the contact form, despite having no idea what my model number actually was (I'll get to that in a moment) only to find that the moment I sent it the page ceased to exist entirely, presumably due to some kind of paradoxical event in the space-time continuum. I tried again, but no, the page still crumbled into a fleeting binary digit the moment I set eyes upon it. So I tried the repair request form, but first had to work out exactly what my model number was. The monitor has it branded conveniently in the top corner and it is pasted on the box several times as 'W2242S'. The first time I entered this I was helpfully told that no such model existed, indeed the second and third time I was told it again. Then, lo and behold, the next time it worked, despite typing (in fact, pasting) the exact same model number in.

Now follows a list of the options it gave me, followed by a brief poem to break up the monotony of lots of tiresome model numbers:


W2242S-BF
W2242S-PF
W2242S-SF
W2242S-SF.AEKVQPN (my personal favourite)
W2242S-SF.AEUQQPN
W2242S-SF.ARUVQPN (name of my first hamster)
W2242SM-SF

Is it too much to ask,
to name products en anglais?
In daft numbers you bask,
whilst I drift off in a haze.

My mind these codes do baffle,
came here looking for help,
ended up in a raffle.
This website makes me yelp.


Ok, so Shakespeare I am not but then he never had to contend with the frustration of finding a product number on the back of a monitor (thankfully, or else Hamlet would have taken a bizarre turn). Unfortunately the tangle of wires I call my desk or, when I have had a few, Steve, made digging out the product code as difficult as the boxes in the garage. When I located the silvery sticker I found that it had half a dozen more codes on it which sounded like they could be model numbers. If I were to be pedantic and actually type the model number that the online form asks for I would end up with 'W2242ST' which it would then promptly (in theory anyway, the site was being terrifically slow earlier) tell me does not exist. The PFT.AEKGAVN bit could potentially also be the model number, although it sounds suspiciously like a Russian made assault rifle to me, and the product code without that bit of communist jargon is simply the name that is branded everywhere else. Only at the top does it actually say that my particular monitor is a W2242S-PF, although why it is that is unclear. I had assumed, wrongly, that BF was 'Black Finish', SF was 'Silver Finish' and then I got as far as PF and realised that a 'Pink Finish' monitor would result in the marketing team being sectioned under the mental health act...

I really need to try and wrap this up soon... I entered that code and it asked me to register it, which I did, for both monitors, something, that like washing my hair, I probably should have done years ago. After creating my login and registering them I figured I was moments away from finishing this whole godforsaken exercise but then the site helpfully declined to offer me any means for actually submitting a claim. Every time I entered the monitor model number it simply asked if I would like to register it and examining my already registered products gave me no hint at how to finish this level and move on to the next one, I looked online for a walkthrough (I know it's cheating but I was eager to move on to the boss fight) and then remembered that this was not the latest installment of the popular (though frankly, done to death) Zelda series and was meant to be an online support system.

I decided to try another product to see if I was simply not allowed a claim on these because they were no longer being sold (despite them still being under warranty) so I had a look at your television section on the site. I grabbed the model number of the first one and pasted it into the claims form and then... it told me it didn't exist. Oh for fu... your website just tried to sell me it Mr Claims Form how can it not exist? It's that temporal shifting business at work again isn't it? Oh that crafty space-time continuum and his ineffable contempt for the internet.

Anyway, I tried the second one on the list and it actually offered me a repair thing... shortly before the website very helpfully informed me that I could not do that at this time because the support system was under maintenance... Again, oh for the love of uncharacteristic censorship on the internet, could you not have told me that half an hour ago, you know before I got so angry that I actually considered buying a dog just so I could shout at it for desecrating my garden by means of relieving my stress (though not relieving it all over the roses).

So yes, that is pretty well the entirety of my tale, your website has aggravated me to the point where I am considering simply tippexing over the line of deadness on my screen on the basis that most of what it should be displaying is white anyway.

So how are you going to resolve it? Well I would suggest replacing not just my broken monitor but also the second, perfectly functioning, one on the basis that the replacement will not be the same model and hence will not match (I have a strange feeling it may well be involved in an incident soon anyway). I am not asking for money, sexual favours or a courtesy butler that can read my emails and word documents out to me whilst my monitor is out of service (although I would love to see him trying to describe events in minesweeper through interpretive dance), so I do not think that my request is too much. At the very least I expect this post, sorry, 'treaties', to be published in your training manual under the section 'Dealing with Complaints from Writers', though perhaps 'Dealing with Complaints from Time-Wasting Lunatics' would be more appropriate...

Thanks for your time, now if you could show me to the door...

(Apologies if the formatting has gone all to hell on this but rest assured that is also the fault of your site.)