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IoT Garage Door Opener Maker Bricks Customer's Product After Bad Review (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Denis Grisak, the man behind the Internet-connected garage opener Garadget, is having a very bad week. Grisak and his Colorado-based company SoftComplex launched Garadget, a device built using Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle, on Indiegogo earlier this year, hitting 209 percent of his launch goal in February. But this week, his response to an unhappy customer has gotten Garadget a totally different sort of attention. On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget. He left an angry comment on the Garadget community board: "Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iPhone app, powered phone off/on - wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here..." Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon: "Junk - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY - iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products." Grisak then responded by bricking Martin's product remotely, posting on the support forum: "Martin, The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I'm happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I'm not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection."
I have no problem with what the company did. If he would've called tech support and not been a jerk maybe he'd have gotten the issue resolved and everybody could've been happy. Instead this lunatic gets online and goes off on the company as if he's entitled to never run into a technical support issue with a product. I'd have bricked his device too.
My parents owned a local tavern. Enivatably there'd be a non-regular customers from time to time who had a legitimate gripe they would bring to the attention of a server but were total a-holes about it and would demand to speak to a manager and then try and throw an employee under the bus even though the employee in question did everything possible to try and resolve the issue to the customer's satisfaction.
Their money was always refunded and they were told to get the hell out and to never, ever come back again. Some people's money simply isn't worth accepting.
You have every right to bring a problem to someone's attention but you don't have a right to be a prick about it unless the matter isn't properly addressed.
I go out of my way to try and be nice to anybody who is providing me a service even if they fall short so long as I can tell they care and are trying. 9 times out of 10 if you kill somebody with kindness they'll take care of you. For the other 10% that's when you go over their head and kick things up the chain.