Exploranter Life Style

Global companies don’t respect global citizens, take HP computers for example.

Companies are stretching their operations around the globe. Global brands can be bought everywhere on the planet.

This should be good because people are increasingly more mobile, moving homes and countries more often, easier and faster than before.

But these companies, in a vain effort to protect themselves from parallel markets created by differences in retail prices due to differences in local markets taxations and trade regulations, create policies of no service to products bought abroad.

And what about the global citizen, that buys a product in one country, moves to the next, and needs services and warranty in a third?

These companies simply turn their backs on them. Take my experience with HP computer as an example.

I work with tourism and for 5 years I lived in Patagonia, back and forth between Chile and Argentina.

Back then I bought an HP Tablet computer, with all the gadgets: touch screen, voice recognition, hand writing recognition, lightscribe, you got the picture… not an entry level laptop…

worst yet, I bought two identical ones…

Right from start I noticed that both got too hot in the back vents, even too hot to touch. But since both got equally hot I thought it should be normal, part of the project, as bad as it seemed.

A while later I moved to Brazil and the motherboard in one of them burned. I contacted HP Brazil over the phone and they insistently affirmed that products bought abroad would not be serviced through HP Brazil. Through the internet I only got one reply. Curiously the attendant replied because it was in a language he did not understand, Portuguese, and he asked me to reply in English. So I did, never to hear from him again. So, it must be a HP global policy to ignore requests from places different from the purchase territory.

My questions were very simple:

1) Is 1 and ½ years the expected life span of an HP Laptop?
2) Is it a flaw in the project that they get so hot?
3) What can I do to prevent the second one from burning too?
4) What can HP do to help me with my burned laptop?

So, companies exist because of their customers or despite of them? Because I am feeling rather dischargeable as a client, because I might never again buy an HP product and they don’t seem to care.