'Expert' shop staff

SexyGreyFox

SexyGreyFox

SexyGreyFox

Man of Honour
Joined
29 Mar 2003
Posts
57,882
Location
Stoke on Trent
Expert shop staff are one of my biggest hates but this is my most recent case.

On friday I went to a well known Audio/Video shop and bought a Wharfdale DVD/DIVX player but it didn't work and my eldest daughter decided to take it back on saturday with a note describing its faults. I also gave her a PC made backed up DVD, one made with my standalone Pioneer DVD recorder and a disk full of AVI's to test in another machine. This was the phone call -

Nikki - Hi Dad, the three men here say that there isn't a machine that plays AVI's
Me - Nonsense, put one of them on.
Assistant - Yeah mate, no such thing as a DVD player that plays AVI's
Me - What do you think DIVX files are?
Assistant - Well they aren't AVI files
Me - Is there anybody else there who knows about such things
2nd Assistant - Yeah mate, he's right, there are no players that play AVI's.
Me - DIVX files are compressed AVI's, I suggest you put the disk in one of your DIVX players and watch a miracle happen.
2nd Assistant - No you're wrong
Me - OK but try it

About two hours later my daughter walked in with a £35 Cyberhome and she said the staff were gobsmacked they worked.

C'mon tell your stories about incompetent staff
 
yesterday i went to a local pc store.

me: hi, i need a replacement cpu fan.
him: *hands me an 80mm case fan*
me: no, i need a cpu fan.
him: you can't get them.
me: er.. yes you can.
him: no, cpu's come with the fans. they are not seperate.
me: ok, nevermind... *goes to order from ocuk instead*
 
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Dad was looking for a laptop so i went with him as i know what crap the shop staff talk.

Looking at a Celeron of some type, in a laptop.

Assistant: Yeah, so this laptop has a celeron, it one of the best CPUs you can get
Me: BEST!
Assisstant: Yeah, itll overclock to 3.5GHz or higher
Me: On stock cooling in a laptop?
Assistant: Yep, plays game really smooth and doesnt even get warm
My dad: Whats overclocking? (*sigh*)
Me: Making hardware run faster than its stock rates, sut itll void the warranty
Assisstant: No it doesnt void the warranty
Me: So your telling me a 2GHz (around that) celeron will go to 3.5GHz on stock cooling in a laptop and be able to hold it steadily?
Assisstant: Yes

I swear people say anything to sell things.
 
In a store couple weeks back looking at a Samsung 42"LCD screen -
Generic nub comes over and starts spewing out what he reads on the little cards already on view -
"Yeah this is the latest model with HDTV but they have a new model out in a couple months and that one is gonna be Blu-ray!"
lol try and make him explain what he thinks here
"eh?"
"well you see this is HDTV but they have a new model coming out thats not HDTV but its going to be there new format which is gonna have Blu-ray on it"

riiiiiiiiiiiggght !!

(dont worry I quickly explained to him about it all ;)
 
A non computer savvy friend of a friend went into high street electronics store and came out with a USB 1.1 hub because "Yeah mate, that'll give your computer USB 2"
 
I bought a TV Card from the PSB, had some fault with it whereby there'd be a line of interferance running vertically down the video.
I took it back and explained the fault.
"Ah, that's a problem with your monitor"
"... no... it only displays the line within the video window"
"definitely a problem with your monitor"
"Ok... well, I've got a dual screen setup, a nineteen inch CRT and a brand new £1600 42" Panasonic Plasma screen, explain why it happens on both?"
"Oh, it'll be a problem with the cable then"
"........ THEY HAVE SEPERATE CABLES!"
He then starts going on about how it must be a problem with the graphics card and my dad interjects
"Are you going to refund him or not?"
"Yes of course"

I mean... WHY?!
 
A friend of a family member bought a computer from a well known store telling them that she will be downloading music and playing music on it...

They decided to sell her a PC with no speakers :eek: .

She took the PC home expecting there to be speakers, but nope.. nothing.
 
We once sent a company a motherboard back and this motherboard had the Ninja heatsink plate stuck on the back of it still because those things are impossible to remove. Anyways many days later an 'RMA'd' motherboard arrives at our house, and what do you know, it has the plate still on the back, weird we thought, they must have repaired it, although they did say they were sending a brand new board. Anyways the board still had exactly the same problem, so we phoned this company up and said:

Us: You havn't replaced or fixed this board
Them: I can assure you sir it's a brand new board

And so the convo carried on, funny that i didn't know that particular board came with a free Ninja heatsink plate on the back!

lol
 
A couple of faves from the past -

Customer - Does this Philips Laservision record?
Rumbelows assistant - Not yet but a device will come out soon which will enable it to
Customer - Are you sure because I don't want to buy it and it won't be able to record
Rumbelows assistant - I assure you sir that it will record in a few months time
Customer - I'll buy it
(Assistant walks off to get a new one and I lean over)
Me - Excuse me mate but that machine will turn into a frog before it will ever be able to record. It will never be able to record.
Customer - I thought as much


Around 95 we had a local PC shop called PC Drive-In and my mate was having problems with hieroglyphics on his screen in DOS :eek: I actually knew this to be a fault of the motherboard because I had fixed two earlier that year. He asked me to go with him for moral support and to explain the problem. We sat on a comfy sofa while the experts took it away. My mate then said that he had left an official Multimedia animals cd in the drive to which I then said they would blame everything on that disk. My mate told me not to be daft but about five minutes later the expert came out and said "We've found your problem, its the CD disk in the drive, its known to have a problem". I had a complete hissy fit and I got ejected from the shop but I told the guy over and over it was the motherboard at fault. 30 mins later they asked me to come back in and into the repair room where I tild them the fault because their £3000 harware/software diagnosing tool couldn't pick it up.
We left and said we would come back 3 hours later. On returning they said they had changed the graphics card but it was still the same problem and pointing to about 15 of the same 256k ( :) ) graphics cards they said all of them are faulty so we've put another type of 256k card in. I then looked in the machine and noticed they had changed the motherboard to which they completely denied it. I said that in the bottom left hand corner of the mobo I had scratched a cross into it so they must have rubbed it out. They admitted they changed the mobo but still insisted it was the graphics card :rolleyes:
Because the new graphics card was crap my mate took it back a few days later and they put one of the faulty stock back in and it was perfect :rolleyes:

The same shop had charged a bloke £30 a time to get games working. He would buy games off them, try to install them and they wouldn't work. He would take it back the shop and they would write batch files to get them to work and he had done this three times. He overheard me talking at a computer fair and asked if he could pick my brains. I told him to bring his machine to my house and I'll see if I could sort it. In the old days soundcards had switches on them for different IRQ addresses and all I did was swop it from 7 to 5 and all the games worked without the batch files. At the time any expert would know about IRQ addresses and I'm so glad that they went out of business.
 
You evil sod!

Shouldn't blame the staff for not being quick on the uptake :p

Don't really have a story myself, at least nothing springs to mind. I do however remember my mate insisting a cpu fan wasn't running. I told him to stick his finger in. He did. He swore. :D
 
The company that "maintains" our network, systems and custom database software sent one of their techs in the other day to collect a couple of hot swap drives. He came in and said "I'm here to collect two hard drives. Er, S (pause) C (pause) S (pause) I (pause)".

"Do you mean scuzzi drives?"

"No, S (pause) C (pause) S (pause) I (pause). See it says here.".

No wonder the network is always falling over, and the systems are so badly configured!
 
Not PC related, but music.

I was looking at guitar amps on Denmark Street (supposedly the best place in the UK for music equipment). I wanted something reasonably small. At the time Marshall had released a 15 watt mini stack, which had a head and two small 8" speakers. It wasn't an amp I'd consider, but while talking to the assistant I mentioned that at least it could be mic'd up and might be loud enough for small gigs.

The assistant said "No you wouldn't need to mic it up, it has it's own speakers."
Me "Well, it's 15 watts, it would have to be mic'd up at any venue larger than my bedroom"
Assistant "No, it has it's own speakers, look, two of them."
Me "Amps 10 times louder still get mic'd up. It would have to be mic'd"

The assistant looked at the amp.

Assistant "But it has it's own speakers, look."
 
I remember in my old job (laptop tech support) one of my colleagues returned a laptop for repair with the diagnosis "microphone not working" and the repair centre found no fault with the note "this model does not have microphone"

Those were the days...
 
Rang up the Xbox help line when my 360 couldn't download any demos a while back, connect with the help girl went something like this:

Me: I can't download any demos, it appears to timeout and then says connection error
Girl: What membership level are you?
Me: Gold, free trial with about 2 weeks remaining
-2 minute pause while she wonders off-
Girl: Ok, on the free trial, certain features get locked out as you get closer to the end, so that's why you can't download
Me: but wouldn't it say something along those lines instead of telling me 'connection error'
Girl: I don't know, but that is the reason, because the downloading feature has been locked out
Me: but you don't need a gold membership to download demos anyway, a silver membership will do, it's a technical fault and nothing to do with my account, can I speak to a supervisor
Girl: well i gave you the reason, I suggest you get into contact with our billing dept.

The thing that confuses me about that conversation is that i thought they were just reading out of a standard answers book, so she must have just guessed the answer to my question, and passed it off as fact.
 
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