Sick of seeing customers screwed over and billed for unnecessary repairs by undertrained technicians, a Staples tech writes in to tell the incident that made him quit. See this picture? This is the floor model computer where he was told to copy all of a customer’s hard drive data as part of their diagnostic process, then he had to leave the area and leave all the data up on the screen for any customer to see or snag with a thumb drive. The full story, inside…

A customer brought his desktop tower computer in for service, Microsoft Windows XP Home, will not post boot and rolls at start up at the XP GUI screen. The head technician without having run any diagnostics determines “it’s a virus that infected the hard drive and caused it to fail”. The instructions I received were as follows. Do not diagnose the issue, just remove the hard drive from the tower and connect it to a USB to PATA adapter, then take the 3.5 inch internal drive and adapter over to a floor display model, and connect it as we do not have a service computer. Transfer all the files and data from My Documents to the desktop, and “clean” the customers hard drive up. Now that the drive is powered and sitting in a static filled environment, on top of a metal display rack on a carpeted base for all to see, I was instructed to complete the next step.

Now that the customers documents are left on a floor model laptop for all to see, I am forced to leave the area and go to another part of the store and then reinstall the hard drive back into the case, and run the staples diagnostic utility, leaving this persons personal information for all to copy to a thumb drive. Having now altered the properties of the drive, and having changed administrator rights and privileges the data and drive comes back corrupt in the Staples antiquated diagnostic program.

The customer is then contacted and told that the 3 year old machine’s hard drive is dead, and that it’s not under warranty, and we have a replacement drive and can repair the computer while it’s apart and since it was a “good and expensive machine” it’s worth repairing. Now having left the customer with no option and not properly informing them about what to do the customer is really left with no choice but to repair it seeing as it is in pieces and we have the only copy of their data and school is starting to begin. The Easy Tech manager wrings up the bill, 1 charge service entry, 1 charge diagnostic fee, 1 hard drive service charge, 1 back up and restore charge, 1 format and restore, 1 copy of windows totaling around $480.00 if not more as I did not see the final receipt, which is the cost of a brand new Acer laptop that far surpasses the antiquated desktop.

After hearing what the head tech did to the customer and having put me in a position that compromised my integrity, I quit and told the customer all about it, and now I am airing it out for all to see and hear.

Apparently, when you push the Easy Button in front of a Staples Easy Tech, it activates one of those hinged arms with a white glove and it pulls cash from your wallet.

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