Costco Concierge

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You buy a computer from Costco, they give you a two-year warranty on top of whatever the manufacturer provides. Awesome!

Which was great because my teal, dark, and handsome Lenovo one day suddenly decided to break. This was a purely physical issue—the hinge broke and so it couldn't open more than about four inches without tearing off the screen. 

Coscto Concierge has some rather inconvenient West Coast hours (is this irony?) but I was finally able to chat with their quite wonderful phone people and get my machine sent in.

They included a lot of warnings about the risk of your harddrive losing data which makes sense as most send-it-in problems, I imagine, are harddrive-related. So it may need to be replaced or rebooted or something similar. That's probably even likely.

But I did not want that to happen to me (all that's damaged is a hinge!) as my machine is in great shape harddrive-wise and need not be touched. I even offered to remove my harddrive to take away the slight chance they might screw it up, but they warned me that such would void the warranty. They left me with the impression my harddrive wouldn't be touched unless necessary and, barring a major screwup on their end, it would not be necessary. Thus, when they included the paper asking me to agree to their terms, I said okay but you better not. I even got them on the phone to reassure myself. I also refused to turn over my password because I didn't want to tempt them to get all extra on me and because, well, reasons.

Then I sent in my laptop.

And then I received this email:

Excuse me?

Maybe this is a mistake?

I wrote back asking if this was actually the case.

The asked me to call them.

So I did.

Apparently, it is Costco Concierge's policy to, no matter the repair, reinstall the OS and all drivers just to make sure it works fine after repairs.

EXCUSE ME???

ALL I NEEDED WAS MY HINGE FIXED.

Not the person on the phone's fault, but I complained. And when she told me they always do this for any repair, a) that wasn't clear (that it might happen was clear; that it would was not; I could have fixed this myself!) and b) ALL I NEEDED WAS MY HINGE FIXED.

When I go to the hospital for a broken leg, they don't also give me complimentary heart surgery just to make sure it's okay.

This is a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE policy.

She said she would note that in the file kept for my little hinge repair.

No. I want this complaint moving up the chain. This is a bad policy. It's too late for me not to get screwed but they really need to think about why they have policies and what their purpose it. Because this is an obviously stupid policy. An incredibly stupid policy. And now I have hours of work ahead of me getting my computer into proper shape again because Costco Concierge has a jones for heart surgery.

Anyway. Costco is not easy to send missives to.

So I'm posting this complaint online. Maybe somebody somewhere will see it.

I doubt I'll ever know.

When my patient phone person finally agreed to send an email to management about my complaint, I asked to be cced. She couldn't do that without permission from her supervisor.

One would think Costco is better than this.

> s i g h <

Maybe this rage will be the impetus I need to finally drop my membership.

UPDATE:

After writing this but before posting it, I have opened up my laptop. Hinge works great! Everything else is terrible. I'm logged into Windows as "User" and when I try to log in as myself, I get this:

Haven't figured out how to fix this yet.

Can't wait for them to tell me to send it back again!

UPDATE:

It changed its mind and let me start that log-in process. But it wants me to log into my Microsoft account using a different password than what I use to log into my Microsoft account. And I know I'm right because I logged into it via a browser and my password works fine.

Costco Concierge is ruining my life.