The Hack Shares

Customer Service Story of the Day: After owning my Storm for less than a month, the touchscreen stopped working. I was scared to take it into Verizon for trouble-shooting. I was certain it wouldn't be covered under any kind of warranty, as I had bought it on eBay, but I thought if I was charming enough, they might give me a quick diagnostic test.

The downtown store at Westlake and Stewart was packed on a Saturday, and I sat for a long time, listening to some melodramatic man's very long phone conversation about his crazy social life, before I got a smiley young man who heard my complaint, looked at my phone, checked for water damage, and said, "Well, you're still under warranty. I'll just replace it."

Wuh-buh-huh?

"Sure!" I said brightly, giving him a big smile. "Thank you!"

He smiled back. "No problem! Isn't this a great phone? We all have them here." As he spoke, his manager pulled out his own Storm to make a quick call.

"I'm a big fan," I said, watching the minutes tick by as the smiley young man transferred all my data and microSD card. Any minute now, I kept thinking, he is going to actually look at my account, realize that I didn't buy this phone here, and bring this entire process to a halt. Never happened. I now have a brand new Storm for the price of a used one.

The best part is, the whole reason I upgraded in the first place is because my Voyager camera only worked occasionally. And of course, the day I went into Verizon to replace my Voyager, they were out of them, so they upgraded me to the enV3, so now I have a brand new enV3 sitting at home in the box.

Waiting to be sold on eBay, obviously.