Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Dilemma

Recently, computer time has been a bit of a struggle in my household.  Until last weekend I had a MacBook Pro and an HP desktop.  Well, one night about two weeks prior my desktop decided it didn't want to turn on anymore, and when I tried one last time to power it up sparks ensued.  Needless to say, it semi-blew up and is no longer usable. I've had it since college so in technology years it is getting kind of old and I knew this day would come.  However, my girlfriend Megan and I both are in grad school and sharing one computer has not been working out so hot.  She has three classes which of course involve lots of assignments, and I am in an online masters program that is obviously totally reliant on the use of a computer. I should also mention that it is my final week of my current class and I have a 400-point 12+ page paper due in two days (I'm on page 4 right now).  Given the student promotion that is going on at Apple until the end of the day today, we decided to go get another computer.  We opted for getting something a bit different and got a MacBook Air. After my desktop blew up that had tons of files on it, we also thought it would be a good idea to get some sort of an external hard drive.  Our sales rep was very knowledgeable and told us about Apple's Time Capsule.  It's the best router on the market that also happens to have a 2 TB hard drive built in, and with the time machine app on mac computers it makes it super easy to backup all of your data everyday.  The next morning we setup our new router and gathered the warranty information and receipt together so we could file them.  That is when I noticed that we were never charged for the router ( a $300 value).  Megan, being the upstanding moral person that she is said we had to do something and it would bother her if we didn't at least call the store.  So, yesterday we called the Apple store and told them what had happened and the lady on the other end of the phone was completely stunned.  Never in her years of working at that store had anyone came in or called and pointed out that hey had not been charged for something.  She thanked us for our honesty and said she really didn't know what the proper procedure was for this, so she asked us to bring the router box into the store.  Today after work Megan is taking the box into the store, where I am assuming they will charge us for the router.  Now, I know I can't really be disappointed because it is money we would have spent anyway, however I can't help but be a little bummed.  I kept thinking that maybe we would be rewarded for doing the right thing, but I guess that kind of defeats the purpose right? We both asked several of our friends and family what they would have done in this situation and we got mixed results.  These were the most common answers we got:
* Just keep it, Apple makes enough money they don't need your measly $300.
* Take it back, it will bother you forever if you don't.
* No one will ever know...and if it breaks later it's not like you paid for it anyway.  You spent enough on the computer, they owe you. 
What do you think? What would you do?

Allison

1 comment:

  1. Blog Update: It pays to do the right thing. Apple rewarded us for our honesty and let us keep the router for free! We even got a receipt for our records and theirs :)

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