Lenovo's Catch 22

Lenovo is crap and its people are slime.

Fiorella bought a shiny new Lenovo laptop on March 21, 2010, at Fry's Electronics. In August 2010, Click, her local repair shop, had to send it back to the company for a new motherboard and hard drive. Click noticed the lid was a little damaged when the computer came back, but Fio decided not to press the issue; she'd been too long without her computer.

Recently Fio noticed pages were flipping and, knowing her one-year warranty would soon run out, drove over to Click on March 17 for them to copy her data onto another computer and send the Lenovo back in for more repair. On March 21, the repair shop called Lenovo to check out the warranty and was told that Fio had purchased the computer in mid-February so the warranty had run out.

So, credit card statement in hand, Fio called 866-96THINK to straighten everything out. But a sharp-voiced Asian woman told her Lenovo's records showed the laptop had been purchased in mid-Feb and that Fio would have to supply a copy of the purchase invoice to prove otherwise. Fiorella promptly contacted Fry's, and the photocopy of the invoice arrived on Mar 28. Fio had indeed purchased the Lenovo on March 21, at 11:44:04 in the morning, to be exact.

On Mar 29, Fio called Lenovo to arrange for her computer to go in for warranty repair. The nice South Indian man whom she talked to understood the situation and said Lenovo would honor her warranty, no problem. He gave her another phone number, 877-453-6686, and told her to choose first option 2, then option 1.

Fio connected with a woman who told her that her warranty was now out of date because it was now March 29, eight days past March 21. Fio explained that she had been forced out of her one-year warranty by Lenovo's bookkeeping being incorrect in listing her purchase date as mid-February. The woman said there was no record of Fio calling on March 21 and that the only way she
could get warranty service was to pay for an extended warranty.

Fio asked to speak to a supervisor. Afraid this phone call might also be denied in the future, she got his name: Tony, PHO31448 (although she wonders if it was fake). In a smart-alec voice, he told her the same thing the woman had, adding that the machine had been manufactured in December. Fio pointed out that the Lenovo service center had trapped her, first by refusing to service her machine under warranty because their records mistakenly listed the laptop as having been purchased in February, then, when she had proof of the correct purchase date, by saying that she hadn't called on March 21.

Apparently Lenovo's recordkeeping is haphazard at best, convenient at worst: the basic motive of both Tony and the woman seemed to be to persuade Fiorella to extend her warranty.

Fio finally ended the call, but she isn't done with Lenovo by a long shot. She's contacting Verizon for her list of telephone calls on March 21, going to ask Click for a redacted copy of theirs for the same date, and then fire off a few letters to selected personages.

Don't mess with Fio. When it comes to combating injustice, Fio's a pit bull.