Warranties - a cautionary tale. Don't cover replacement. Sony don't even cover faults they know exist at the time of sale.

UPDATE: Sony got back to me. They paid for a repair man to come out and replace the power board - apparently they are now called static converters.

Sony have moved their call centre to New Zealand. A few of the guys I spoke to were very, very helpful. I guess it pays to be patient.

One important lesson though: Don't be lazy.

You have 21 days with Sony to return the item.

The one-year manufacturer's guarantee covers repairs not replacements.

I should have packed the TV back up immediately and taken it back to the store for a replacement on the first day.

 

Original post:

When I bought a Sony Bravia widescreen 62cm TV for about $1000 in January I extended the warranty (FIVE YEARS).

I didn't realise that the warranty doesn't mean that they will replace it if it is faulty - what exactly is a warranty worth to a customer?

Do I have to be an alchemist to turn a warranty into a warranty?

I didn't realise that the initial one-year warranty offered by Sony itself doesn't even cover the cost of getting someone out to fix the fault which it appears they actually knew about when they were selling the X5500 model to dopes like me. By the way it also affects the Z5500 model. Wonder how many dopes there are suffering it out like me?

I should've taken it straight back the moment it switched itself off without warning on the first day 30 minutes after I installed it - I just couldn't hack repacking it and then reinstalling it.

Apparently Sony released the Firmware Update Version PKG1.428AA patch in January - the month I purchased it.

The download stops the TV from launching into self diagnosis i.e. going dark.

On Friday afternoon my TV switched itself off and went dead. I went to bed disgusted. It still didn't work on Saturday morning.

And at 9am today, Monday morning, a Sony representative informed me that the only option I had to fix the TV which was still under a 1 year warranty was to download this patch, put it (the patch not the Tv) on a USB stick and then stick the USB into the back of the dead TV. Self service. The new Sony warranty.

If I wanted to get a repair man out to do it then I would need to pay for it myself.

So just for fun I asked for the number of the closest Sony repair guy - at this stage I believed I could download the patch myself but I wanted to know how much it would cost to fix a TV under warranty.

Call me troublesome. 

The repair guy told me he needed paperwork from Sony to come through normally before he could come out otherwise it would cost me.

He thought it was weird too.

So I went to the website to download the patch - however the download is not Mac compatible so all I got was a page of crap. So I rang Sony again.

They wanted a reference number from my initial call and I told them that the generous guy who took my call didn't give me a reference number or take down any details.

No he "offered" me this download and website directions only - EVEN THOUGH THE ... TV... is still under WARRANTY!

They have promised to get back to me tomorrow. My 10-month-old TV is having a little lie down. 

Shall keep you posted.


Brisbane's water pressure: Drought pressure versus flood pressure. Push & Pull.

Water authorities reduced the water pressure to stop us from using too much water in drought.

But have they restored the water pressure to normal now that the floods have broken the drought?

This was a question raised in the dog park this morning by another dog owner who lives in Wishart.

She says the trickle out of her taps has turned into a gush in the past week or so. I haven't noticed a difference.

This is an ugly specter given the outrageous cost of water these days - cost her $1000 last year.

The cost of water is what brought up this question: is the water authority forcing us to use more water now by playing with the water pressure? Revenue raising?

Everyone knows the Government is broke - it's announced water board amalgamations & mothballing of now unneeded new infrastructure like desalinations plants.

Interesting question arises here: Do we trust a water authority or is this a case for Grommit?

The Case of Little & Big Water Mongers. Da-Da-Ra-Da!

 

 

Passing through the eye of the storm. Queensland's Record Big Wet.

This was Moreton Bay, off Brisbane,  just a week ago. 

This picture sums up all we believe about the Sunshine State, but this was an aberration in Queensland's holiday weather this year. 

I've been curious to see the totals for rainfall, so I've gone and collected them and put them up here.

The rain started falling in March, even before the 2009/2010 El Nino event was declared dead in May (and La Nina took hold in winter) .

The Bureau of Meteorology climate report for 2010 says last year was our wettest year in 20 years - by the end of December 1109.7mm of rain had filled empty catchments.

But it continues to fall ... so before Christmas brimming water tables, rivers, creeks and dams spilled into provincial towns leaving thousands of people homeless.

Now, finally the waters have inundated the Brisbane River pushing it into the heart of Queensland's capital city.

Unbelievably, flash floods gushed through the mountain town of Toowoomba which sits high on the Great Dividing Range.

This amateur footage came through just after 5pm on the ABC yesterday. 

Today,  media outlets buzzed with crowd-sourced details, video and photos, as well as stuff off Twitter and Facebook.

ABC News was the only broadcaster to pick up the Queensland Police Service's Facebook stream of Premier Anna Bligh's first disaster update of the day this morning - it was strange to see a Facebook page on the television - viva la revolution! 

By the afternoon, they had dubbed the Toowoomba event (123mm rain today) an inland Tsunami - 59 people missing, nine people dead, so far.

Luckily, BOMA predicts sunshine by Saturday for Toowoomba.

Moreton recorded 614mm this week at Peachester -  the state's highest rainfall this week. 

Last year's Brisbane's total rainfall was a 20-year high.

(BOMA) ( Updated: First post had the wrong table for Brisbane's total )

So let's hope that this week marks the end of this cycle. Here's the year 2010 figures:

As for those of us who are still safe, it feels petty to complain about the soggy yards and patios and unruly gardens and muddy dogs and slippery roads and potholes. 

I did go to Bunnings to get sand to sandbag the back patio to stop the invasion of gathering puddles and streaming rivulets. Bunnings sold out of hessian bags ($15 a pack) and was moving 20kg bags of sand by the half dozen - likewise with bags of pool salt. People had trolley-fulls of pool salt. Lucky that's all they were worried about - hey?

I bought a hessian bag a week ago - just in case - cut it in half and sewed it up with an antique rusty needle my grandma brought with her from China. Never really had need to use a 13cm industrial needle before - I don't think they sewed sandbags with it, they sewed eiderdowns stuffed with camel hair to keep warm in sub-zero temperatures. Bought my digital radio which runs on batteries a few months back - along with candles and matches. They're turning electricity off in flood affected areas. And then there's the lightning during the storms. Looking forward to the dry season.

 

Teardrops by Japanese composer Masaya Misono. A healing meditation.

Butterfly outside my window before the rains came.

Teardrops - 涙 from Lisa Yallamas on Vimeo.

Japanese composer Masaya Misono (雅也御園) describes his composition Teardrops as New Age Ambient Piano Music - I call it gorgeous.
I like the atmosphere of the song: 曲の空気感が好きですね。

I discovered Misono on SoundCloud:


Teardrops by Masaya Misono

How to be an odd cog by Dune creator Frank Herbert - or how to write an easy best seller by David Ogilvy.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. - David Ogilvy

Wouldn't it be nice if employees came with "update" statuses - just like your computer tells you that a new version is available and asks you to install the update to the existing program?
Sometimes this capability is actually built into "creative, original" thinkers but unfortunately it still doesn't happen at the push of a button - and you know how impatient people are with five-second updates. Scoff, not me, of course.
It takes a little time and a lot of intellectual, emotional, financial resources - I do it so believe me, I do know.
Most businesses operate on the basis of David Ogilvy's little theory. Barren thinking.

Ogilvy's theory obliterates any chance of the human update.
The ideas of creative and original thinkers are often ridiculed rather than listened to - this happens to innovative and creative leaders, not just odd cogs in the machine.
"Sho' me the money!" - remember that little catch cry from Jerry Maguire.
Some companies are way ahead of the curve, like Google. Its 20 percent policy allows employees to play and invent on the job from which came Gmail apparently.
Also, I'm sure somewhere out there are companies that do successfully navigate the inherent difficulties of managing diversity - human resource manager could learn a lot from Mother Nature who never tries to bring the ecologies down to one common denominator - one size fits all. And the only size available is a size zero.
I know there's truth in the Ogilvy quote but to me it's weighted too heavily with a negative gravity.
Here's a better quote from an audiobook I'm listening to:
"You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record."
Please note the reference to "economic" i.e. business
"We have the record in front of us and our course is obvious." _ Frank Herbert wrote in Dune , a novel which is considered to be the greatest science fiction book ever written.
It's a massive work. And I see imagery which George Lucas stole for Star Wars - every sci-fi movie ever must in some part owe something to Dune.
The best seller was rejected by 20 publishers before being published in 1965. But Herbert started the research in 1957.
Is there any reason why this scale of creativity should be the domain of the arts?
Why not in science and business and government and the rebuilding of broken communities?
It's hard to believe that Herbert dreamed Dune from researching scientific research about stabilizing sand dunes using poverty grasses.
What's even more difficult to believe is that Herbert actually saw the project through to success - are you one of those people who can't even write a letter?

 

How to overcome that overly familiar feeling of being beside yourself. The secret of resilience.

The ancient Greeks believed that when a person is under intense pressure the soul leaves the body and literally stands beside itself.

I think that we live in a world where the souls actually put a little distance between themself and themself - just to be safe.

On the eve of Cyclone Yasi while north Queensland was bracing for impact, some people were worried about the price of bananas. 

Just like Cyclone Larry a few years back, Yasi flattened Australia's biggest crop.

And you know I'm struggling to keep all of this in perspective too because I'm sick of listening to all the news about disasters - it feels like the dominoes are falling around me and I can't stop the chain reaction.

I don't know if the ancient Greeks were right. They say that you should cultivate the ability to objectively observe the world and your ramblings through the world: i.e. stand outside yourself and watch.

Years ago I did a course called The Centre Within at the Relaxation Centre which talked about examining other points of view when dealing with stressful situations, rather than just reacting to events.

People go on and on and on about the importance of resilience - how do you teach resilience? Researchers build careers on how to build resilience and they are still talking about it.

Well, resilience is the opposite of "churn". Last week I was doing some data entry work - the annual update of an email mailing list of thousands of email addresses.

It was weird to see how people swung between Optus and Telstra. 

And how many email accounts people have and how many times they change their email addresses - these are small business doing this and virtually engaging in suicidal behaviour.

I suspect that people may be the only animals on earth who demonstrate this "churn" behaviour - it makes people and businesses vulnerable doesn't it?

Watch any nature documentary and there's a predictability, a continuity of behaviour - unless there's an evolutionary change. 

Evolution. The ability to adapt is the key to survival - that's a great theory but exactly how many species are extinct, hey?

Maybe teachers can use Spike TV in the classroom to demonstrate resilience - you get hit from all sides but you have to learn where the obstacles are to avoid them.

I wrote a series of feature articles for the Courier-Mail year ago when they announced the six Queensland Greats - Great Queenslanders who were all high achievers.

I asked all of them one question: What's the secret of success? The answer is resilience.

They said they just kept getting back up when ever life knocked them down - resilience is enduring the put-downs, the bad luck, the prejudice, the loss, the grief, the feeling of being beside yourself.

But to me it's summed up in one word. Steadfast.

That's the motto of Mansfield State High School - it's something that stuck in my heart when I wanted to give up when something I really wanted was just out of reach. Doesn't mean I got it.

And I'm going to make an utterly ridiculous suggestion here but how can we think that animals don't have souls?

If they weren't wired together body and soul then they could not survive - even those silly banana birds stand beside the body of their friend who's squashed on the side of the road.

It was instinct that brought people together en masse in the Great Floods Clean Up - social instinct. What a great collection of souls that was!

Fall down seven times. Stand up eight. _ Japanese proverb.

Australian classics: the train bloke and the plane bloke. Sink your teeth into two inspiring short stories about real people.

There's this bloke I met who commutes from the NSW Central Coast to Parramatta five days a week.

He sat on the floor of the train I caught from Sydney to Woy Woy on Friday night at 7.38pm. 

I asked him why he travels four hours by train and bus from the Central Coast (where he grew up) to Sydney's western outskirts for a job.

For one, he likes where he lives. For two, he likes his job. 

He had 68 people turning up on Monday (that's today) for job training.

He works for a job agency training unemployed people.

And on Sydney's western outskirts you will find at least 71 different nationalities - people from all over the world trying to make a new life in Australia.

He loves the interaction.

This bloke was unemployed for 18 months - it was the worst time of his life. But this agency trained him and also paid for a new set of teeth for him.

So he travels to this job that he loves for four hours every day - he loves his job. He's not concerned about missing a TV program.

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So there's this other bloke I met this morning on a flight home to Brisbane - he took my bag down from the overhead locker for me just to be nice.

He was on his way to Roma to work as a locum doctor - he's a doctor from Syria. He migrated to Australia five years ago to escape the Middle East havoc.

He flies into Charleville and other little rural towns which need doctors to work for a week and then flies home to Sydney.

The tone in his voice when he spoke of how beautiful his homeland of Syria is told me how much he must miss it. 

He had a photo of his son on his iPhone. And he asked me whether I could recommend any Australian books to read in simple English.

He would like to improve his English by reading books by Australians. So I recommended Seven Little Australians by Ethyl Turner and Cloud Street by Tim Winton.

I suspect his reading may be better than a lot of Australian-born people who take no interest in literature apart from Who Magazine or Zoo Weekly.

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So glad to know it is still possible to have a civil conversation with a stranger in this country - how else do you build understanding? 

Nice change from the regular suspects who seem to lurk behind shop counters and office desks who think they are too good to talk to you - maybe they plan to sell their story to Who or Zoo, eh?

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