Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/10/nintendo-how-to-deal-with-difficult-customers.html
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YouTube helpfully suggested this as followup viewing.
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“In many cases, customers simply failed to follow the simple directions packaged with their product.”
It shouldn’t bemuse and upset me after all these years, but I’ve come to the conclusion that, for whatever reason, a significant portion of humanity is incapable of following even simple and clear instructions. That same portion is also more likely to act like the arseholes in this video when dealing with customer service people.
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I got a good deal on a Sony TC-D5M tape recorder because the eBay seller thought it didn’t record, when actually you just need to press the “forward” and “record” buttons together in (what used to be) the normal way.
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For a second I thought that was Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole) at the beginning of the video and now I can’t convince myself that it isn’t. Yeaaaaaaah…
EDIT: Better yet, as it turns out, that guy at the beginning is Grant Goodeve from Eight is Enough!
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Well that was weirdly delightful.
If the customer is David Sedaris better give him the refund.
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You gotta blow in it!
my first reaction was “holy crap that’s grant goodeve” and i was simultaneously delighted and ashamed that i knew that
What are you supposed to do? Tell them what you really think? Of course you can’t do that.
Au contraire mon frere!
My Nintendo cleaning kit back in the day: lungs, lips, carbon dioxide
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Yeah the cleaning kit was a real throwback! How is it that we’ve gotten through these last decades without someone trying to sell us USB connector cleaners?
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Watching this video, I can’t help but think that the best instructions are no instructions. For example, it’s not a crazy thing to design the software so that the controller can work in either port. The contrast knob on the Game Boy really had no need to go down to completely blank. And the copy-protection chip that Nintendo used was the root cause for many of the “cleaning” issues.
That’s not to say that there aren’t bad customers, like the guy with the console covered with sticky stuff, but good design goes a long way towards resolving these types of problems.
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Absolutely! Good design benefits everyone.
I also think it’s less about “good customers” and “bad customers”, it’s more that everyone has a bad day sometimes. Same with driving- I’ve raced for 15 years, had my share of professional training, yet I still do the occasional stupid thing on the freeway. When you get 5 million people on said freeway, there will always be someone near you having an off moment, which leads us to believe “everyone else is a bad driver”.
Sure, there are consistently bad drivers and self-entitled dicks who are consistently rude to service workers, but I do think it’s mostly a numbers thing. David Sedaris not withstanding.
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