Unless you service your own car (in which case you don’t probably
need a garage) you’ll know that experience of taking to the mechanic who is explaining
why you are about to become sever hundred pounds poorer, and having absolutely
no idea if he’s being straight with you. I’m lucky enough to have learned through experience how my car works and I’m
fortunate enough these days to have a garage I trust, but there have been times
when I’ve confronted a lying mechanic and explained loudly enough for all the
other customers to hear in no uncertain terms why he’s full of shit, and where
exactly he can get off. I can’t say I don’t enjoy it when this happens because I
do get a certain pleasure out of exposing corruption at every level.
This week we’ve come across two eyebrow raisers. The first
was a woman who turned up with a MacBook and a 4GB memory module which she’s
bought at an official Apple reseller. Our job was to install this for her,
which would have been a pretty easy while-you-wait job had the memory actually worked.
When we explained that she would have to return it we were horrified to find that
she had been charged £120 for a SODIMM which should have cost less than £30. It seems
garages aren’t the only culprits when it comes to taking advantage of middle
aged women.
The second case was a small business using a single hosted
Exchange mailbox. We were tasked with specifying and installing a replacement
PC, and in the course of discussing their requirements I discovered that they
were paying £110 a month for about 9GB of server storage for this mailbox. Now
I know that this won’t mean much to anybody who doesn’t themselves use hosted
exchange, but the point is that the going price for this service is about £10 a
month. The original price had been about £50 a month, but then the mailbox had
apparently reached an arbitrary size limit, and the company involved, realising
that they had a real sucker on their hands, decide to really stick the knife in
and more than doubled the charge. I initially assumed the customer was
confusing annual and monthly billing cycles, but they were very organised and
had all the paperwork to support the case for the prosecution.
Sadly we live in a world where consumers are at constant
risk of the rip-off merchants, and it isn’t limited to the shady back street
when companies such as Adobe think the great British public should pay 38% more than our American cousins.
We might expect our politicians to defend us were they not too busy selling out
to whichever corporate lobbyist is
entertaining them this afternoon, or whichever media mogul they are most
beholden to.
Personally I think there a lot to be said for an honest wage
for an honest day’s work. I may not drive a shiny black Range Rover like most
of the subjects of your average Watchdog exposé, but as any Land Rover driver
will tell you, there’s a lot to be said for setting out in the certainty that
you are going to arrive, even if it may take a bit longer because you’re doing
it properly.
