great service that deserves a mention

ok, good news first, or bad news?

i guess bad, cos it's more logical...

anyway, david's laptop kinda died (as in, crashed) on saturday night just suddenly out of the blue... the hard disk just won't start up and it's making funny clicking noises. so carol goes online to search out the support number of IBM in Denmark. she finds a service support number and an address, presumably that of IBM.

so on Monday, david takes an hour's journey to a nearby borough north of copenhagen, called lygnby, only to find some farms, horses, and an IBM office - who couldn't help. meanwhile, carol tried to call the service line, only to get transferred around (in danish, though they were all rather helpful, polite and proficient enough to switch to english right away) only to find that the service support team is actually 37km west of copenhagen, instead of north, and that she had made the poor boy journey so far for nothing...

well, almost nothing, cos he found ikea on the way there... :p

anyway, so they thought it'd be impossible that they had to bring the laptop all the way to that faraway place... and decided to email the service group, which was on a totally different non-IBM website instead. after a few glitches with the model number, she found out that there was still an international 4 hour response warranty on the laptop and they asked for her phone number and address. when that was done, back came back a computer-generated reply (in danish of course) saying that they had received confirmation. everyone home at griffenfeldsgade was puzzled as to what that meant but went to sleep with the mystery unsolved. that was last night.

this morning, carol gets rudely waken up by her phone at 9.30am, and greeted by a string of fast-paced danish (sheesh she didn't even catch the 'hej', or the greetings that she was practicing while doing danish hw the night before - on phone greetings!). anyway, this man on the phone switched to engelsk right away and said that he was 15 minutes away.... so out climbs carol out of bed..

(ooh ok he's at the door now... talk about efficiency and punctuality... to be continued...)

wow, it was a 5 min job! he turned on the laptop, heard the noise, opened a new hard disk and replaced it. no questions asked and no signature required even. heh... but now carol has to call IBM again to get them to send the software.... well, the bad news is that all the information inside is not recoverable, and it would cost 25000 dkk to recover it... by some company called ebase, so no thank you... sorry david...

btw, while he was here, he heard the whines of carol's fujitsu as well, and suggested that she called up the serivicegruppe too........... might as well.... the fujitsu must not die!