Customer comes into the store and buys a used computer. He is very nice and everything is going well. He pays for the computer and takes it home. We don’t hear from him for several hours and then he calls and says his mouse doesn’t work. We try to do the usual diagnostics over the phone, but we can’t seem to get the mouse to work over the phone on his computer. It appears to be connected correctly and it should be working. We recommend that he bring it in so that we can check it and he hangs up on us. We figure that he will be on our doorstep any time now.

The customer shows up on our door step and he puts the computer down on the counter and he vents on us and tells us that Windows doesn’t work right and that he can’t get the mouse to work. We pickup the computer and plug it in using our mouse to check the port. The computer sees the mouse fine and we show it to the customer. He then complains on how the desktop is setup and we put the pc into classic mode so that he can see the icons on the desktop. We then shutdown the computer and begin to plug in his trackball (all the while he is going crazy on us) and we notice that the pins on the trackball are bent. We show it to the customer and he apologizes up and down, and he leaves on good terms.

I don’t understand why people have to go off and be so upset without any provocation. We were more than willing to help him. We obviously couldn’t see the trackball over the phone so we couldn’t tell that the pins were bent. What are your experiences?