I thought of this one as I was responding on another thread. Certainly it can be interesting and sometimes even funny when you call a business to have something repaired. I've got two - both happened to my father.

About 16 years ago my father went to a basketball game and in retaliation for his team (the visitors) winning the game, somebody smashed the back window of the car.

So he called a company to come out to the house to replace the back window. The car was parked halfway in the garage with the back window facing out toward the street. When he got home from work that day he found that the back window was not replaced - they had somehow not noticed the shattered glass at the rear of the vehicle and had replaced the windshield instead!! #-o

To make it worse - for the remainder of that car's existence the replaced windshield leaked whenever it rained! :roll:

Second example. After finishing up mowing the lawn with his garden tractor (his baby), my father went into his house to change for a meeting. When he came back outside he found his prize garden tractor (only ~ 1-2 years old) engulfed in flames shooting 10-12 feet into the air. Fortunately, he hadn't parked it in the garage yet - or his house would have gone up in flames.

When he called the company about the "trouble" with their tractor, first they tried to claim he must have done something wrong. Then in future calls they said it was an "act of God".

The truth was that there was a design flaw in the steering column that caused short circuits which led to fires. Ironically, he kept getting the friendly bulletins sent out to owners of this companies products. In these they included stories of owners of the products. So my dad sent the bulletin editor a detailed story about his encounter with the company and let them know they were welcome to use it in their bulletin.

Dang, that tractor must have been some sinner! Maybe it was coveting the neighbor's weed whacker?

Not a repair story, but definitely funny. My previous boss told me of a story involving his father and a spat with a credit card company. He had paid off his credit card, but the company insisted that he still owed $.01 (not kidding...one penny), and they were insistent that he pay the amount. He tried numerous time to have them write it off, and they would only balk at him and demand payment. So, he caved in and sent them a check, but for $.02 cents instead...he then wrote a letter demanding a refund for the credit of $.01.



*edited for ugly spelling.*

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Homer no function beer well without – Homer Simpson

I remember something similer happening to my friends dad, I think it was 3 cents left for a phone bill or something and they refused to let it go so he paid credit card and so it then cost the phone company more money instead. (cause of credit card fees)

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

Just a minor incident:
Long time ago I was working as a electronics repairman in a factory manufacturing telephone systems for companies. Once I was repairing this door-phone, which basically was just a metal plate with a circuit board attached to it's other side (it is sunk to the wall so that only the metal plate shows to the user). I traced the fault to the microphone, changed it, and tested it in a acoustic tester. Fault had gone worse. I was puzzled, but then decided to try to change some other component. Then I tested it again with no luck, and as I was walking back to my desk from the tester I noticed that the microphone was pointing towards me, which was rather odd because I was holding the phone so that the face of the metal plate was pointing towards the floor. I had attached the microphone to the wrong side of the circuit board. :-? #-o

Positive side of this was that it worked when I changed the microphone to the correct side, so I originally traced the fault correctly. 8)

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"Stupidity gets denser in a crowd" - Old Finnish saying. [My website and My BLOG] [Nimblebrain forums]

Reminds me of the problems I had with my University Telecommunications Billing office. When I moved off campus, I paid my bill in full. For the next 6 years, I periodically would recieve a late notice, indicating that my last bill of $0.00 had not been paid, and that an additional late fee of $0.00 was being assesed. If the new total of $0.00 was not paid within 90 days, an additional 15%, or $0.00 late fee would be assesed. I thought about doing something about it (I checked to see it wasn't doing any damage to my credit rating), and decided that it wasn't worth my effort to stop them from spending the money on postage telling me I didn't owe them money
I guess somewhere along the line they figured out that I didn't owe anything, and stopped billing me. I still have the bills on file in my records.

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.ASM programmers drive stick shifts - and I do.
A Bugless Program is an Abstract Theoretical Concept.

Couple of funny write-ups on equipment I've seen:

"Blown Fuse"--on a unit that is entirely operated by air--nothing electric on it at all.

"Spools to 6000 RPM and does not produce electric"--on a gas turbine generator. This model's engine runs in excess of 10,000 RPM and it's tach is marked in percent of rated speed. Guess he had a calibrated ear.... (by the way--it ran just fine when I checked it...)

Funny repair story: I was working on a neighbors car with a dead battery. It was parked where I couldn't just jump start it to check the charging sysem (I suspected they just left he light on anyways), and they didn't need it real soon. So I was pulling the battery out to put it on my batery charger...

[Neigbor]The battery's dead--the lights don't work

[Me] I've disconnected the terminals

[Neighbor] The lights over the door don't work now anyways--so it wasn't that I left them on

[Me] I'm carrying the battery up the driveway to charge it--nothing is going to work.

[Nieghbor]????

[Me] [Insert detailed explanation of a cars charging system]

...and I still am not quite sure me neighbor understood.

edit: Funny getting parts story:

My first "car" was a 1977 Ford F-150. The engine that it came with was taost because of the previous owner running it too high on oil all the time, so I dropped in a 390 (1968 block from a circle track race car ).

Shortly after I put the engine in I went into a major "discount" auto parts place to get some spark plugs and wires for a tune up. Told the part guys behind the counter what I needed for the engine--he had seen me drive up and told me that that engine wasn't in that truck.

[Me]Yes it is.

[Parts Guy]No it's not--Ford quit making those engine in 1968.

[Me]It's not the original engine--I put it in myself.

[Parts guy] No you didn't--it wouldn't fit!

Rinse, lather reapet until I finally get my parts. I quit going there and now use NAPA for most things..

Putting the engine in was a rather easy install--other than when a guy tried to "help" and pushed the engine into the center of the engine bay while I was lowring it in with the hoist--I had it ofset for a reason, as he found out:

[Eninge] Crunch! Drip...drip...drip...

[Him] ????

[Me] Uh,...you just crunched my heater core....

It was southern Georgia, I had no insulation in the cab (pulled it out because it was so dirty and never bothered replacing it) and I was running headers--even in the middle of winter I had to have the windows rolled down to keep cool in it...

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

Did they send it?

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"It's time to receive our missions from The Head."

From what I remember they did. It was a while ago that I heard the story and really only the story itself stuck out in my mind, but I remember him saying that they did issue the refund. After the trouble they put him through, I can't imagine he'd let that one go without getting it.

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Homer no function beer well without – Homer Simpson

I had to return an amplifier to a second-hand shop because the volume knob was worn out to such an extent that channels popped at maximum volume when turning it...

I added a very detailed description of the problem (all combinations of volume, loudness on/off, what happened to each channel etcetc) to it.

As I returned the amplifier:

Me: "the volume knob is worn out, the note explains it all"
shop (a cashier, not the repair service):"What exactly is wrong with it?
M"the volumeknob makes screetching noises and the left channel plays at full volume or falls out when I turn it"
S"OK but what EXACTLY is wrong with it?"
M"I assume the potentiometer of the volumeknob is worn out, which makes bad contact during volume changes, which gets amplified by the loudness circuit, as described on the note I gave"(I started to think whether it was a good idea to let the amplifier be repaired here )
S:"OK but it's just that I have to write here on this receipt what your complaints with the thing are"
M:"OK; write down that there is something wrong with the sound, see note"
S:"OK thank you"

... :roll:

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Over the years I have had a few places that irked me, so I would routinely overpay my bill by a nickel so they would have to mail me a statement every month showing the credit balance. The bastids.

I service musical stuff. A woman brought in a personal keyboard - an electronic piano sort of thing. Wrapped in a blanket, smelled really bad. She said: the cat peed all over the keys one day and it quit working. I was afraid my husband would get mad at me, so I wrapped it in this blanket and hid it in the closet. That was about 6 months ago. He found it today and made me bring it in so you can fix it.

The cat wee wee had melted the plastic inside and corroded away parts of the circuit board. I made it work eventually and gave it back with the advice to leave it out in the open a while to air out. EWg.

We had in another industry a customer whose night cleaners always unplugged a piece of our equipment when doing the floors and not plug it back in. EVery week we got the call that our damned equipment wasn't working again. They reported pressing all the buttons. I would ask if they had checked the plug. They would say just a second and then I would hear "Oh" in the background and they would come back and tell me it was OK now. This went on for weeks.

Once had a bar way out of town call on a weekend that their juke box had a rat in it and they wouldn't go near it. I was on call for the vending company that night so I gathered up anything I thought useful to kill rodents. and I drove the 40 miles out there. Found out the mechanism needed oil and it was squeeking. A mechanical rat I guess.

As Steve Martin says in Trains, Planes..

Just because something happened doesn't make it an Anecdote!




There are no funny repair stories!

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=;

I had a very funny repair story, but it's fixed now.
oh never mind

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Ugghhh- cat urine is the most corrosive stuff I've yet seen get into a piece of electronic equipment (the second most corrosive is Coca-Cola).

Here's one of my experiences:

In '99 I had two jobs, one as a tech in a recording studio and another working in Philly's only pro audio repair company. One day one of our clients (a DJ in one of the waterfront clubs) brought in the crossovers and drivers from a pair of EAW PA speakers. Since our division of labor was that I usually did the electronics stuff while Gene (the owner) did recones, I wound up working on the crossovers.

All of the capacitors were blown- shorted. When I had replaced these and set up a test jig to run frequency response sweeps and verify that all three sections were working correctly, I discovered that the air-core inductors in the woofer sections had failed. This is simply a coil of enamel-insulated wire; there isn't much that can go wrong with it, but this one had several shorted turns. I also noticed that the boards the crossovers were built on was covered with some dark gray stuff and smelled like a barbecue.

When he picked them up I asked him what had happened and got the reply "the speakers caught fire". Sure enough, the woofer cones had burned away to tiny remnants.

We asked him what he was using to drive these speakers and it turned out that he was running a pair of 4 ohm cabinets with an EIA power-handling rating of 500W from an amp rated to deliver over 1600W per channel into 4 ohms- and driving that amp well into clipping. The poor speakers had basically been bludgeoned to death with massively excessive power.

The next week he was back. The same thing had happened. All of the components I had just replaced were blown; the brand new inductor had gotten so hot that the plastic tape which held the coil in shape had melted.
We repaired them the same as before, and just like the previous week, he brought them in on a Wednesday and absolutely had to have them for Friday night, so we had to get replacement parts shipped overnight. He had changed the amp he was using- instead of subjecting the speakers to over 300% of their power-handling rating, he was now only hitting them with a 240% overload.

Of course, his speakers burned again the next week. This time, instead of considering the possibility that there was something wrong with what he was doing, he decided that Gene and I must not be repairing them correctly, so he shipped the crossovers back to the manufacturer to get them fixed. They replaced exactly the same components I had already replaced twice and failed to return them in time for his Friday night gig.

At that point he decided to stop running the speakers with passive crossovers and to go bi-amp instead. That did put an end to the crossover failures...

A couple of weeks later I arrived at work and Gene said to me "I heard from J----- C----- this morning. His speakers caught fire again."

And I said "let's give thanks for meatheaded DJs in Mob-owned dance clubs. They're keeping us in business."

I think every shop has a customer like that. I call it retirement plan.