so what good are warranties, anyway?

As many of you know, CG has “new world headquarters” located in a nice little border town in CT.  We’ve made several upgrades in our new home, which include having some pretty fancy garage door openers installed.  Now, I don’t know a ton about them, but I do know that when they go wrong, they really go wrong.  Allow me to explain. 

Upon attempting to open my garage door yesterday, one of our openers decided to make all sorts of grinding noises, refusing to pull the door up.  How nice.  So, after a little looking around, a disconnection of the door so it could be opened manually, we determined a warranty phone call was in order.  This is where things went down hill. 

As we recall it, warranties are designed to guarantee a product works when it’s installed as prescribed.  And trust me, this garage door opener was installed by a helluvan electrician.  Yet when calling the Genie Company, instead of help on how they’d fix it, we got instructions on how to take the damn thing apart!  That’s a little out of the scope of the CG Webmaster’s handyman expertise. 

Upon discussion of that, we found they’d be willing to send a garage door man out to the home, if we’d be willing to pay the man.  Now, correct us if we’re wrong, but isn’t a warranty supposed to correct defective merchandise with no out of pocket expense incurred by the owner?  Hmmm…

Needless to say, this is ridiculous.  Could someone please explain why companies make it so damn difficult to obtain warranty service?  Oh yeah, it ruins their bottom line!  However, sadly for them, we’ve got a way to correct this problem…at their expense. If necessary, we’ll just buy a new one, replace the old one, and return the old one for a refund.  If that’s the way the company is going to force me to gain satisfaction, that’s what we’ll do. 

Heh, warranties.  They’re worth the paper they’re printed on, aren’t they?