Worst that can happen with my angry customer?

[Bruce]

Hi, so I've been dealing with a very unsatisifed customer for the past few days. They've been threatening to take legal action and fraud charges against me. I charge as long as $30 dollars for computer repairs as my slowlane business in my hometown.

Here is my side of the story.

Her harddrive was corrupted and Windows no longer booted. She than contacted me and hired me to backup her photos/documents and reinstall Windows (which would restore the corrupt files). I reinstalled Windows and created backups of her files. She than paid me my $30 dollars and I told her my work(reinstalling windows and backing up the files) was warranted for 30 days. Two weeks later her harddrive corrupts yet again, she gave me a call and I took a look at her laptop and it seemed that each time the files were restored (through system restore) the files would corrupt shortly after. From what I saw the harddrive seemed to be faulty and corrupts files shortly after creation/installation. On a side note she also blamed me for her husband torrenting 500gb of files and filling up her harddrive, broken burner and jam stuck in the SD card slot. I explained the situation to her and told her that her harddrive is faulty, which isn't related to my work and there's nothing further I can do. She than told me she'd talk to a technician and get a new laptop. But today she called and is now harassing and blaming me for the corruption and wants me to pay for a new laptop, and refund her. She's also threatening me with complaints for fraud and scamming her for $30 dollars. I offered her a refund and advised her to get a replacement laptop because it seems to have a faulty harddrive that corrupts. She still has a few months of warranty on the laptop, but she doesn't wish to get a replacement and instead wants me to buy her a new one.

What should I do? What can she do to me? Is there anything to worry about? If I refund her what can I do to prevent her from extorting me? Does anyone else feel like she is just trying to extort me?

This issue to me seems to be blown out of proportion, I've tried my best to help and to my understanding it isn't my fault.

PS: I'm from Canada

Thanks for reading.

 

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[Kung Fu Steve]

Fire her.

Yes. You can fire customers.

Why put up with that shit? Send her a check for $30 and say "don't contact us again."

Hard to do in a small town? Maybe. But you must be extremely frustrated to ask a
bunch of business people what to do - take care of yourself first.

I get people who say they will take me to court once in a while. I just say "get in line."

 

[JEdwards]

I love the old I am going to sue you line..

Tell her, please sue me.. I pray to god you sue me. Now that you said that you are going to lawyer up, crazy lady, I cannot talk to you anymore. Have your atty call me and I will deal with him thanks. hang up.

If there is 1 thing I am 1,000 percent positive of in life, no lawyer takes a case from a crazy lady over 30 bucks.

Also you did the work, so do not refund her the 30 either.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Tell her to f*ck off. You did the right thing by offering her a refund. I would have done the same.

Once she escalated to "I will sue you" she crossed the line from unsatisfied customer, to Sidewalking bitch. Good customer service is extended to real people and real customers - not idiots like this. I always love how people threaten "I will sue you" when the cost of an attorney is greater than the dispute.

Tell her to pound sand.

 

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[Bruce]

Thanks a lot for the responses, everyone. I've given her a refund just now and requested she never contact us again. If she tries to sue/harass I'll tell her to get in line or pound sand.

But from the looks of it, it seems everything is settled. Hope my future customers will not be this difficult.

 

[GlobalWealth]

Also you did the work, so do not refund her the 30 either.

I'm with JackEdwards except for this part. From a moral and egotistical perspective, I say keep the $30.

But from a practical standpoint, you will be better off sending her the $30 and being done with her.

This 'I will sue you' mentality is such bullshit. Like Jack stated, there is no atty on earth that will take a case over $30. Or even $1000 for a new laptop for that matter. There's just nothing in it for them.

At least in the US for there to be a justifiable cause for a civil suit, there must be damages. If you give her the $30 she cannot even claim that as damages. Remember, she brought you a broken computer and you gave her back a broken computer and a refund.

 

[LamboMP]

lol, over 30$ computer repair? Does she have any idea the cost incurred from legal action?

Get rid of her. Sounds like an idiot to me.

 

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[Pete799p]

lol, over 30$ computer repair? Does she have any idea the cost incurred from legal action?

No I am sure she doesnt or she does but the I will sue you think is all she has to threaten you with. Dont let her bully you around, Do what jack said. It is funny when you call these peoples bluff.

 

[Ãœbertreffen]

I'm with everyone on this and you made the right decision to refund her, Bruce.

Not everyone you deal with is going to be happy. You can offer the best service in the world and deliver successfully and someone will still come around and try to take you down. Since I'm in the construction field you'll hear the same type of people calling other places and basically try to get the services/product for free. It seems people love to complain and it's like a second job for them to try and get people to cave in.

I've even seen people who try to return a product. They would send back a package that was ripped open and the product removed from the package. However, it's pretty funny when you compare the weight of the shipping label when you sent the product to the customer (heavier) from when they send it back.

Leave the dramatic people for someone else to deal with. They're not worth your time.



- Devin

 

[InMotion]

Well...I was at best buy several years ago and saw two guys get into a fist fight for the last product on sale during black friday; fight eventually made it up on the counter. So maybe a fist fight?? lol

In my view if you performed labor in exchange for money then it doesn't matter if shes unhappy she cant sue you for not fixing something. Seems like that's about like suing your mechanic because he didn't find out whats wrong with your car the first time.

 

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[jaywolf]

Tell her to f*ck off. You did the right thing by offering her a refund. I would have done the same.

Once she escalated to "I will sue you" she crossed the line from unsatisfied customer, to Sidewalking bitch. Good customer service is extended to real people and real customers - not idiots like this. I always love how people threaten "I will sue you" when the cost of an attorney is greater than the dispute.

Tell her to pound sand.

Hahaha MJ I love how relentless you've gotten lately. I remember watching your youtube videos and in the beginning you were trying to avoid using curse words and over time it progressed into no bs, tough love tirades!

 

[jaywolf]

I've noticed there's a specific type of personality that usually tries to pull this kind of shit, usually people who have it in them naturally or that have evolved into seeing that this "bullying" works with a lot of people who are too passive to stand up to it. These are the kind of people that are what's wrong with the world today. They prey upon the decent, honest people in society because they know they can get away with it most of the time. I personally applaud the consensus here in telling that bitch to pound salt! There is nothing she can do to you especially given the facts that you did everything in your power to be as professional and courteous as possible and like mentioned before, caused NO damage to her shit, you received a broken laptop how could you be responsible for breaking it further? LOL

Just the notion of threatening to SUE over this matter screams slowlane ignorance, because even if she DOES decide to foolishly waste her time (and unfortunately yours) she'll never win.

 

[Pixpax]

I've been threatened with legal action around 10x in the past 2 years running my business. How many people actually did it? Zero.

They send very serious sounding emails, but if you really think about it, they are utterly ridiculous.

Also - the threats always seem to imply that by suing they are definitely going to win, there is also litigation risk for the person who sues, but they just pretend that the courts have basically already decided in their favour. Even though what they say is moronic.

One customer failed to pay for 2 months, her next step was to threaten to sue for £10,000, despite the fact that she never even paid a single penny of her invoices.

Another customer said he would take us to the Information commissioner (data protection body in the UK) and we would spend 10 years in jail which is ridiculous. He then said he knew where I lived and would come and stab me - charming!

These people are definitely in the minority, but if you have a customer base of 100-200 or more, the law of statistics suggests you will have a percentage (5-10%?) of sociopaths, fraudsters and just A-Holes.

 

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[Ãœbertreffen]

I've been threatened with legal action around 10x in the past 2 years running my business. How many people actually did it? Zero.

They send very serious sounding emails, but if you really think about it, they are utterly ridiculous.

Also - the threats always seem to imply that by suing they are definitely going to win, there is also litigation risk for the person who sues, but they just pretend that the courts have basically already decided in their favour. Even though what they say is moronic.

One customer failed to pay for 2 months, her next step was to threaten to sue for £10,000, despite the fact that she never even paid a single penny of her invoices.

Another customer said he would take us to the Information commissioner (data protection body in the UK) and we would spend 10 years in jail which is ridiculous. He then said he knew where I lived and would come and stab me - charming!

These people are definitely in the minority, but if you have a customer base of 100-200 or more, the law of statistics suggests you will have a percentage (5-10%?) of sociopaths, fraudsters and just A-Holes.

Exactly. Unfortunately with the territory comes some of the negativity in others. Sure, there are legitimate arguments and cases at times but if you did everything you could that's not acceptable to some people. They ask for the world and everything must evolve around them.

I can't believe someone threatened to stab you. They might as well throw their case out the window after that. Technically you could have reported these matters to authorities as threats such as that in the world we live in now a days shouldn't be taken so lightly.

I remember when I was younger my father had another company call us for service. The couple owned a business and the wife asked my father for an estimate over the phone which we don't do if we haven't checked out the property. However, my father knew the location very well (it was a residential service we were doing for them and we've done work in there previously). He gave her a quick estimate of what it could be (subject to checking out the lot) and her response is, "that's highway robbery!" My father explains the price (huge costs because it required tearing up a public road or digging underneath it). These type of customers don't take anything into consideration and expect some how, some way they'll get it done for dirt cheap. Needless to say, my father said check around. A week later she calls apologizing and wanting us to do the work. My dad got the last laugh when he calmly says, "I will never do business for somebody like you."

The customers you have are not always who you have to look out for. Watch your back and make sure those you go in business with, B2B for example, can also be full of the same type of people. We've had some very interesting things happen. We did a remodel under a project manager. We do project management of our own and do a lot of remodels. We did this as a referral from a close business relationship we have with some people in the same traits. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have done it. Well, long story short, the project manager didn't know her head from her a$$. She'd call us for help and we basically took over telling her what needs to come next. Well on top of helping her out, she takes the money from the home owners (where she is to distribute to the contractors) and paid her wedding with that money. Well, we sued the crap out of her. She had no case and she knew it. She didn't even come to court! Default win for us. We would have won without a doubt anyway. The icing on the cake was that she had to pay everything back plus all our fees endured (lawyer fees being one of the extra big fees).

At that point, you don't care if you get your money back. It's to teach people like that a lesson. What was funny was that she tried to start a woodworking business after that. She used the same bank account from her project management business. Well, we froze the account and took care of that. Got the whole amount paid back pretty quickly after that.

This is a mild case compared to another we dealt with that was a news headline. Not worth getting into, I'm just providing one example to show that those same people attempt to start businesses. They think they know what they're doing. They cannot manage their own money let alone others.



- Devin