Like it says – Zach Johnson
I’d like to relate a story to you, if you don’t mind.
A few months ago, I was sitting in morning assembly, half-listening to the slew of sports-related announcements, when somebody came up and said this:
Now, to understand why this is significant, I’ll take you back a little more. Recently there had been more than a handful of people caught cheating. People erased other people’s names on scantron tests and wrote on their own – they plagiarized, lied, copied tests, copied homework, what have you.
Everyone knew it was happening, but nobody thought to tell everyone that there was a simple solution; be honest, don’t cheat, and then you don’t get in trouble for it.
Now you might be thinking, “What does this have to do with anything?” Well, the answer is this:
It is not your God-given right to RMA something. It is a privilege. If you look at any vendor’s site, you’ll read all kinds of stuff on the return policy. I like the bit that says:
“Physical damage to any product will void the product’s warranty. Modifying a product in a permanent way is considered physically damaged. Newegg.com cannot honor warranty for CPU’s that have bent pins, cracked or chipped cores, burnt or otherwise sustained any other type of physical damage. Physical damage voids any warranty previously implied for any product.”
When you so much as paint the bridges on a CPU or use defogger on your Radeon 9500 NP in the hopes of getting a successful “hard-mod”, you’ve clearly damaged it physically if you try to return in. Yet it’s easily wiped off or covered up.
What about overclocking in BIOS? You can volt-mod the thing to death, destroy RAM, hard drives, processors, etc. Is that physically damaged? Why, yes . . . But they can’t see it. So everyone thinks to themselves “Oh, it’s not ‘damaged’, it just doesn’t work”. TIME TO RMA!!!!!
The first thing wrong with this:
It is damaged, whether internally or externally. Just because you can wipe off the evidence or never generated evidence doesn’t mean you didn’t do it. Lying may get you thrown in jail in court, but you don’t even get a slap on the wrist for doing it here.
Second thing:
There’s not a soul on this site that can tell me if they owned a company and people were bringing back merchandise that they broke and YOU had to pay for it, not them, that you wouldn’t be furious. Why? It’s not fair, of course. Everyone loves to jump on the “bitch and moan” train when something bad happens or they’ve been “wronged”.
Well, I’ll be the first to point it out, but in RMAing something you broke, you’re wronging the company to whom you’re returning the “defective’ merchandise. RMAing a perfectly working CPU because it’s the wrong stepping is just as wrong. Places like Newegg don’t specify steppings and make no guarantees about steppings.
You get what you pay for, that’s what they say. If you want a guarantee, you have to pay a premium on a different site.
Third and worst thing:
Not only do some of you do this, but you ADVERTISE your actions and PROMOTE them to others! MY GOD! What is wrong with this?
Did it ever occur to those guilty of this action that SOMEBODY has to pay for it? Just because you avoid the cost doesn’t mean somebody else won’t. In the end of the RMA loop, somebody pays.
Let’s consider the wrongs here:
1. It’s not fair. While you may say that’s stupid, if you bitch and moan about things when they aren’t fair to you, shut up, because you’re a hypocrite.
2. The cost of RMAing something falls on places like Newegg or AMD. You send them your broken merchandise, they send you a free new processor or video card. Just because you didn’t pay for it doesn’t make it free. AMD or ATI still made the thing and sold it to Newegg. So Newegg gets screwed.
Let’s say AMD takes the hit, just in case I’m wrong. Newegg sends them back to AMD and AMD says, “We’ll reimburse you” or something like that. So now AMD took a hit. But guess what? They know that. So what do they do?
They raise to prices on CPUs, on retail products, and then vendors hike up their prices, not only to cover the increased cost of obtaining the processor or video card, but because they’re losing money too, so they increase their mark up. Who pays for that? We do . . .
3. I’d venture to say that this is somehow illegal. It could be mail fraud, breach of contract, or some other random thing that applies. Hell, it might be a federal offense, since you’re probably sending it inter-state, although it’s a federal offense just to commit mail fraud, I think.
4. It makes you look really stupid. What happens when you see a car chase on TV or a bank robber bragging, in real life OR in a movie? You laugh and say “what a dumb***”. Why? Because they’re advertising their offense and making it worse by running. Here you are telling the entire Internet that you just committed a crime, either legally or morally, like it’s no big deal.
If you’ve somehow taken offense to my little article here, then either it’s because you commit this wrong and don’t agree with me, or you think it’s too strongly worded. Well, this stuff makes me mad, so that’s why it’s worded the way it is.
It’s like a hit-and-run. You commit a crime, you act like you didn’t do it or that it doesn’t “count”, and then you run away because you got away with it. That doesn’t mean you didn’t do it.
Own up to what you’ve done. You buy it, you break it, you keep it; simple as that.
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