April 17, 2007

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I Win! Me: 3, HP: 1

I am writing this post from class, on my amazing and free new laptop. It is so very brand-spanking, and is light of weight, swift of computation, large of capacity, and free of cost. It has lots of whiz-bang new features, like flat "quickplay" buttons at the top of the keyboard (now with less tactile feedback, but more blinky lights!), multiple headphone jacks (both located inconveniently), a shiny exterior paintjob (that constantly has fingerprints all over it, and requires wiping with an HP-supplied cloth like the one people use on their glasses), dual-core, blazing-fast processor (no complaints there), and the number of gigs of RAM is plural! And all I had to do for it was to give up $14 and two months of my life!

The moral of the story is that if you sue a computer company, and your claim is not facially ridiculous, they will give you a new computer with extreme haste. It costs them more to send a lawyer to court than it does to send a computer to you.

It so happens that my claim was totally valid, but I suspect that they don't do too much checking. It isn't worth the time it takes their employees to find out whether they can build a defense to your claim. And the District Of Columbia, unlike many jurisdictions, requires corporations to be represented by a real attorney, so they can't send some peon to argue incompetently against you.

They eventually called me up and told me to go to their website and pick out any new laptop I wanted, with any upgrades I wanted, and let them know and they'd get it to me for free, with three years' extended warranty with accidental damage protection. I did so, and told them I wanted this one, with pretty much every upgrade, and that I also wanted them to throw in a printer/scanner/copier just for the hell of it.

The best thing about this whole deal is that the computer this new one is replacing was itself a free replacement for a previous HP laptop! I paid under $1000 two years ago, and have gotten three laptops (totaling around $4000), and five years of warranty service, plus a printer/scanner/copier. I can't say the downtime was worth it, but I do feel adequately compensated. So the current score? I paid for one laptop, HP gave me three; I am winning 3-1.

And so far I've been involved in two legal cases. This one, and EFF's law suit against Barney. Both settled out of court, with the parties I represented (Frankel, and me) receiving a net total of $7000 in cash and goods. So I'm 2-0 in court. Great success! Thank you, D.C. Small Claims Court.

Posted at April 17, 2007 4:06 PM | Comments (5)

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