First The Government Returns Unneeded Tax Money,1 Now This
The Merchandise
Pictured above is your basic Mad Dog Conqueror FX 5200 PLus AGP Video Card with 128 MB of memory.2 I had purchased an earlier version of this card two or three years ago at a heavily discounted price to drop into an similarly cheap, no-frills, computer in order to run two monitors. This video card was an adequate piece of equipment for my purposes but the only thing special at this point was the low price.
It worked fine for a couple of years and then, as sometimes happens, crashed. When the troubleshooting tricks I knew didn’t restore the picture, I emailed tech support for advice.
This is where the special stuff comes in.
Mad Dog Makes Good
The return email contained a brief list of technical suggestions and unsolicited instructions for exchanging the defective card for a replacement should the recommendations from tech support prove unsuccessful,
Only then did I recall that the original card carried a lifetime guarantee. That fact had not struck me as important at the time because I had purchased products with lifetime guarantees before, and, in every case, had somehow outlived the lifetime guarantee. In each of those situations, it turned out that “lifetime” did not mean my lifetime but the lifetime, say, of a charged pion3 or perhaps a fruit fly in less than robust health.
In fact, based on my experiences, the foolproof formula for calculating the actual length of a lifetime guarantee is
Nevertheless, with nothing to lose beyond the cost of postage to mail the defective card to the company, I returned the merchandise. My skepticism was only heightened when a careful reading of the surprisingly clear instructions failed to disclose such typical requirements as enclosing the original receipts or packaging.
A week or so later, in a much hoped for anticlimax, I received a functional, updated version of the original video card. My only out of pocket cost was the postage fee for mailing the original card to Mad Dog.
And that was that.
The only sad part is that I am so amazed that a company did exactly what they promised without hesitation or hassle that I feel compelled to memorialize this phenomenon in a post.
Footnotes
- See My Rural Fire Protection District Just-a Wrote Me A Letter↩
- For the resolutely non-techie sorts, a video card produces the images that appear on the console screen of the computer. The console plugs into a socket (such as the blue socket at the lower left of the top graphic) on the video card and the other side of the video card (the gold-colored tabs at the upper right of the graphic) connects to the mother board↩
- Pions are subatomic particles with an average lifetime of less than 90 nanoseconds↩
