Anti-Terrorist Oath Required for Seagate RMA

With all the hoops manufacturers are making customers jump through, getting a warranty honored is getting almost as complex as getting a rebate check. But Seagate appears to have taken that trend to another level by making their customers promise not to use their repaired hard drive to make a nuclear bomb. "We had to get an RMA for a defective hard drive to Seagate the other day," wrote a reader at a small compu

With all the hoops manufacturers are making customers jump through, getting a warranty honored is getting almost as complex as getting a rebate check. But Seagate appears to have taken that trend to another level by making their customers promise not to use their repaired hard drive to make a nuclear bomb.

"We had to get an RMA for a defective hard drive to Seagate the other day," wrote a reader at a small computer shop. "I went online to their web site and was greeted with the message 'This website has been changed and updated to make RMAs easier and quicker.' Uh-oh. Everyone in the computer business has learned the hard way that most companies are following Microsoft's lead, meaning that they're distorting the term 'quicker and easier' to mean infinitely harder and more complicated and frustrating and involving far more time. I pointed out the quicker-and-easier term on the Seagate website to my boss and he smiled knowingly and wished me luck."

True to the reader's expectations, the new and improved Seagate RMA website turned out to be virtually useless. "Essentially, after spending 20 minutes filling out a long and complicated 'registration' form (this is quicker and easier?), the website flat out malfunctioned. It absolutely refused to issue an RMA number and simply ran me around in circles. I attempted for some time to get a phone number off the website, but none was present."

Fortunately, as a computer dealer, the reader was able to find a number for Seagate in their files. Calling the number, I was danced through the usual phone tree, and put on hold, and eventually got through to the usual English-challenged representative from India (I think). Explaining my situation, he admitted that the website was 'having problems' and promised to help me. After taking the required information (including all the company information I had already typed into the website), he verified that the hard drive was indeed under warranty, and offered to set up an RMA. He instructed us to wait until we received THREE emails confirming the validity of the Hard Drive warranty and setting up the RMA, and to print out the third email with the actual RMA number and information. I asked why fully three emails were necessary, instead of one or even two, but he did not know. What part of 'quicker' and 'easier' does three emails replacing one represent, do you suppose?"