Truth

My dear Treo (which I both love and hate in equal measure) has been acting rather flaky of late - random resets, power-downs, and refusals to operate at all. Sprinkle in intermittent happy periods of perfect operation. Spin, rinse & repeat.

Having finally had enough, I took it to the Sprint store today. I pay the $5 a month for insurance, so I wasn't worried about cost. It would either be a free repair or a $50 replacement - whichever the tech guy ultimately deemed necessary.

(And if you're one of those lucky souls from one of the other 193 countries in the world who doesn't have to deal with a US cell phone provider, count yourself as truly blessed and annointed.)

I hand it over, the guy behind the counter fills out the paperwork (between monitoring the text messages on his own phone), and tells me to come back in half an hour. I go to have a sandwich. All's well so far.

When I return, it's another 20 minute queue to get back to the counter, where a different tech person hands me the phone, reads some sort of hand-scrawled note and informs me that the problem was the fact that I had installed third-party software.

"What?" I asked. Surely I'd misunderstood.

"Yeah, you had third-party software on there. That was causing it."



Okay, ignoring the fact that the few third-party programs I have came from Palm - the manufacturer of the phone - and ignoring the fact that the whole, entire f*#%ing point of having a Palm smartphone is because it allows you access to a large and varied library of third-party software, and ignoring the fact that I hadn't actually installed anything new in months when it started acting flaky-

-ignoring all these things-

- there is still a huge difference - a veritable wide, gaping Grand Canyon of difference - between bad software and a phone that is randomly losing power. The fact that I could pinch it in just the right spot to make it turn on again (briefly) seemed to me to be a bit of a clue.

I think she recognized my vacant stare of disbelief, because she started offering some explanation of how if I absolutely had to install extra software, it must be installed on the SD card, and not the phone itself, and how I shouldn't back up third-party programs to my computer when I sync my phone.

Okfine. Whatever.

I didn't believe a word of it, but the phone did seem to be working okay now (they'd wiped the memory and reset everything). Happy with the small victory of an apparently working phone, I smiled, nodded, took the phone and left.



I should point out here that Treos have a tendency to lose screws. Over years of daily use, the minuscule screws that hold the phone together tend to work themselves out and disappear into the land of lost socks and misfit toys. I'd suspected all along that this was the cause of my troubles - my three-year-old phone was down to two of the original six screws, and I could visibly see gaps in the corners where the casing didn't fit together as tightly as it should. But, not having a spare set of Palm's proprietary microscrews lying around on my desk, I had no way to test my theory.

Back in my car outside the Sprint store, what should I find when I decide to investigate my suddenly once again solid-feeling phone? Well, imagine that! All those missing screws had been replaced.

Hmmm - let's reconstruct - Tech Guy takes the phone in the back, does a hard reset to wipe the phone and reset the software. It doesn't work (I know it doesn't work because I did it myself a couple of weeks ago, and it didn't fix anything). He probably does it again, just to be sure. It still doesn't work. He notices the screws and replaces them. Now the phone suddenly works. "Ah-hah!" he thinks to himself, shortly before inventing an idiotic story about how it's all my fault for installing third-party software.



My question - and I know I've gone round the moon to get to it - for anyone still reading, I do apologize - my question is a very simple one, and it is this:



Why?



Why not just come out and say, "Hey, man - you'd lost a few screws, but I replaced 'em for you."

What could possibly be gained from the ridiculous fiction?

I do not understand.

And what's worse, I'm disturbed.

If lies are that ingrained in a corporate culture, if "blame it on someone else" is such a deep-rooted philosophy that they can't even do something positive (fixing my phone for free) without somehow blaming the problem on me, how can we possibly hope to get the truth when they screw up?


The mind boggles.