Beyond my Expectations for Customer Service

As promised here is my blog post about my computer repair experience. 

We bought a new HP tower computer from Costco last November.  When we replaced it, the desktop was 11 years old.  Thursday night the monitor was not receiving input from the computer.

Monday morning, I called the Costco Concierge number.  I spent about 10 minutes on the phone as that technician debugged and then he called the HP technician.  This was on Columbus Day, BTW. 

I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with HP, and the whole time the Costco tech was still on the call.  They were going to have me ship the tower to HP and have a turn around of 14 days but I pushed back and said, "I would rather have a tech come and do it here."  "Oh, for $50, we can send a tech out."  This was the only bad part of my experience, why did they not suggest that solution first? 

At the end of the call, the Costco rep said he would set up a tickler to call me in a week to see if everything worked out OK.  I was delighted at their pro activity.

Monday after our call, they Fedexed the new mother board, it got here Tuesday at 11am and at 3:31 pm, a tech called to see he if could come over and install the new motherboard.  I watched very carefully and actually think I can do this next time.

So, from Monday morning at 9am until Tuesday afternoon at 4:30 was the length of this repair cycle, which included the Fedex from TX.

This is not my experience of computer repair in the past.  Although it has been 11 years since we bought a new desktop. 

In the past, I would have had to ship it, or take it in somewhere.  I had already looked on Yelp to see which computer repair places I might have to bring it to.

Have things really changed that much that this kind of service is routine?  I hope so.  Shout outs to Kevin at Costco, Ed (I think) at HP and the tech who installed it, Cuong P.  I am a very delighted user, again, of the HP tower computer. 

The iPad can do a lot but there are certain things, like reading a CD for the class I was teaching last night, that it just does not do.

Nebraska - 4 wheeling with my Cousin Nancy

This is a series of my impressions of our trip last week to visit Nancy, Rex and Pat on their ranch/farm in Nebraska

4 Wheeling Nancy asked me if I wanted to ride behind her on the 4 wheeler.  I was up for it.  Little did I know that she is a maniac on it and I soon became a maniac.  At first I felt like I was going to fall off and held around her middle.  After a while I just held onto two bars, and by the time we were at the cows, I had blisters on my hands from holding on.  I drove coming back, and she almost fell off once when I accelerated too quickly.

This means of transportation is how they check on their cows.  It saves a lot of wear and tear on the truck, and these machine go over everything.  I have new respect for the use of these 4 wheelers, or ATVs, I think is what we call them!

Nebraska - Dust and No Till Farming

This is a series of my impressions of our trip last week to visit Nancy, Rex and Pat on their ranch/farm in Nebraska

No Till Farming - While Pat served in Iraq he observed that Iraq used to be one of the most fertile parts of the world, and is now a desert.  His observation is that they do not take care of the soil, and make sure that enough organic matter is kept in the soil.  He has joined/and is very active, in a group which believe there is a way to rotate crops and leave parts of the stalks in the meadow in an effort to build more organic matter into the soil.  This is a long term vision and they have already had lots of success with their vision.  This winter, they will graze the cows on the meadows, which have stalks full of protein in them, rather than baling hay and feeding the cows that.  It seems to be a pretty complex matrix and rotation of crops.  Their statistics say they have already returned organic matter into the soil.  One of their neighbors who is skeptical of their methods said to Pat one of the days we were there "Your corn looks better than mine."  Pat smiled.

Dust - Apparently they just live with dust all the time.  Their ranch is on a gravel road and since there is very little rain, any time a vehicle travels down the road there is a cloud of dust.  At times, if you are following another vehicle you cannot see in front of you while driving.  A farmer, down their road is harvesting potatoes so there were quite a few trucks carrying potatoes to the Coop in town 11 miles away.  They commented each time, that since this year will be a bumper crop of corn, that the dust when all the farmers are harvesting will be overwhelming.  When we drove the horse trailer and pickup to doctor the calves, the saddles in that short trip had a pretty thick layer of dust already.

This was the sky as Pat was fixing the tractor

It is interesting that fields that are planted without the crop rotation they are using, have a lot more dust.  Their methods keep roots in the ground to hold the dirt down.  I have been back over a week, and I still smell dust!

Nebraska - Equipment Breaks

This is a series of my impressions of our trip last week to visit Nancy, Rex and Pat on their ranch/farm in Nebraska

Equipment breaks - A lot of their time is spend ferrying equipment, trouble shooting equipment, and repairing equipment.  Fortunately Pat is a very good mechanic and can repair most anything.

We arrived on Thursday and Pat was supposed to be planting at a leased field 20 miles north.  When we first got there he was repairing a fuel line on their big tractor, and had to wait for a Fedex shipment of a part at noon the next day.  Most of Friday was spent waiting for that piece and installing it.  On Saturday night when he was supposed to be finally planning he discovered a problem with the exhaust system and repaired that Saturday night and Sunday.

On Friday, Rex drove up a piece of equipment which had a flat tire on the way up, 3 miles from the field. He had been watching the tires but obviously took his eye off it for a few seconds and shredded the tire.  While Pat was repairing that tire, he also fixed another tire on a tractor they they borrowed from their landlord at this field.

Later that day Rex and Rod started to take another piece of equipment named the "Weeble Wobble".  It is so named because when you fill the container with seeds, it leans to one side and wobbles, but it does not fall down.  They ran out of gas only 5 miles into the trip and we took them a 5 gallon tank full of gas and before they could start it up, they needed brake fluid which we hurried to get before the store closed at 6pm. There seemed to be quite a bit of discussion as to whether this particular piece of equipment has a long term future in their process.

We did not see much planting because of these equipment problems, but I know they do plant a lot because the sunflowers we observed were absolutely beautiful. I am sure Pat is driving his tractor right now, as he plants his fall crops, fingers crossed the equipment is behaving.

Cousin Nancy and me, and Pat's sunflowers

These fields are beautiful

Sunflowers are supposed to face the ground so birds don't get to the seeds

Nebrasksa trip - Doctoring calves

This is a series of my impressions of our trip last week to visit Nancy, Rex and Pat on their ranch/farm in Nebraska

Doctoring cows - they have livestock in three separate meadows, all leased. None of the meadows are close to each other, but nothing in Nebraska is close to anything.  They check on the calves at least every third day and while we were there, during the checks they found some sick calves.  Usually they drive the 4-wheeler the 15 miles to the meadow, but since we were with them, they drove the truck.  Nancy showed us how to determine if a calf is sick.  Look at their eyes to make sure they are alert, look for mucus coming out of their noses, plus she probably looks at 1000 more things.  These were the two I could identify.  Since she has done this forever, she has a keen sense of the calves and their health.  All the calves and mothers have a tag in their ear, so we took note of the numbers of the sick ones.

We returned to the house and picked up the horse trailer, with 2 saddled horses.  They have developed a very efficient way to doctor the sick calves.  They park the horse trailer near a fence, and set up a corral to contain the mother and calf.   Once this is set up, Nancy and Rex set off to bring back the first pair.  Rod is very very very disappointed that I did not get a picture of him rounding up cows the second day.  They brought back 3 pairs, and Rod and his horse Doc were part of that roundup.

The mother ends of in the horse trailer and the calf is in a little pen.  In about 5 minutes they give them two injections, take their temperature and on to the next pair.  Their feeling is this is less stress on the calves. In our time there we doctored two meadows of calves for a total of 6 calves.  A rancher gets to know her/his cows very well to know whether they are OK or not, and to know when they needed doctoring.  There was lots of discussion about vaccinations, and whether they should have vaccinated them earlier to prevent these ones from getting sick.

The process seems to be continually improved.  They acknowledged that they are not Cowboys, like Nancy's brothers and nephews, but this system of doctoring calves works very well for them, and it did seem like very little stress on the calves.