Note: This is heavily edited - I had to remove a lot of profanity from the original draft.
So, I had an irate customer today. He brings in his system a few days ago, after breaking it himself, he knows what he has done to it, etc. We take it in, and the next day we work through the system, verify both his problem and the secondary problem that he wasn't already aware of. No big deal so far, pretty standard stuff for us. Call him, let him know he can't pick it up that day, we have to find a proper replacement part. No problems at this point, except he is disappointed he won't have it for the weekend.
It ends up taking a day to find the right part that will match his chipset. Before I get a chance to call him, he shows up, goes off the deep end that the machine isn't ready, and then proceeds to tell me how he can order the correct part over at this place for about 1/3 of the price I can get it at, how he isn't willing to wait even one more day for us to order the part and fix the machine, and then starts belittling the labor required, saying he could do it in half the time we were charging (our minimum charge - an hour). Demands the machine back, which at this point, I'm more than happy to oblige.
Good riddance - and have fun fixing your cheap-ass PC. What I don't understand is why you just didn't do that to begin with, since you already know everything that needed to be done, and didn't want to spend any money on it?
As I spent yet another afternoon cursing at the engineers who designed this particular Lexmark printer I'm working on (and in turn, many of the other models they have built as well), I think I may have come upon a solution that would resolve these bad design decisions once and for all.
As anyone who has done any type of maintenance work on printers before are already aware, some manufacturer's engineers actually spend time thinking about how technicians will actually replace some fairly commonly replaced parts. HP, in particular, is fairly good about this. Others, such as Lexmark, seem to be hellbent on making things difficult. A pickup roller is worn out? No problem - just take off every cover, every electronics board, and the entire drive train, then you can get to it. It is enough to drive you nuts, and to swear off their brand forever, even if they are really decent before they break.
I've often thought that engineers should be stuck in a room and forced to tear down and replace parts in their propotype printers, to get a better feel for what it would take -- hoping that it would guide them into making better design decisions. I've come to realize, now, that this isn't really the solution - after all, they created it, and would be blind to the problems.
No, my idea is simple: make their spouses/significant-others be the guinea pigs. They would be forced to replace the parts that most often break on the machines, with no guidance from the engineers -- they could only silently observe.
I can't think of something that would motivate them more to make their designs easier to maintain -- just imagine the fun when they get home from work after a really trying day. "What the hell were you thinking, putting the release for that roller underneath all that crap?!?!?"
There would never be a bad design again. :-)