Oh, it had to happen. The rattle of the laptop fan portended the crisis, which I have tried to ignore, hoping that my beloved Thinkpad would hold out through DEMOfall. Just two weeks. Then, I’d have the time to copy off my hard drive, document my settings, and send it to a repair depot, hoping for the best even while expecting the worst.
But, alas, the worst came on Sunday afternoon. I was racing to make an already extended deadline, stealing away a few hours from the annual Labor Day weekend friend-fest when the screen went black. The rising heat in my lap should have been a clue, but I was in a hurry to get back to the party and didn’t think to shut down the system and let it cool off. I pushed through; the laptop didn’t.
There, my leather encased “premier edition” Thinkpad. The best it would do was choke up a pre-boot screen, whimper a few faint beeps, cry “fan fail” across a black screen, and go dark again. Little more than an attractive paper weight wrapped in hand-stitched Japanese leather.
A drowned my troubles in a 1996 Orfilia estate merlot and the assurance from that I could steal time on my friend’s laptop early the next morning. One unsung benefit of our browser-based world is that you can pretty much restore to some hobbled productivity through files and footprints left on Exchange servers. I shared my pain on a Facebook update: “ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGG! Thinkpad crashed. Files lost. Recreating them now. I guess this is why it's called ‘labor day.’”
A great wave of compassion and support rolled through the comments: “Buy a Mac!”
I considered it for a moment, but as I’d not planned to spend a couple grand on a new computer this month, I took another approach first: I called tech support. Early Tuesday morning, I dialed the 800 number for Thinkpad premier support, a number I’d tucked away almost two years ago when I got the machine. Until now, I’d not needed much support for the system. Tom in Atlanta answered, efficiently diagnosed the problem, then dropped the bad news. The system board I might need was in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. They’d get it on a plane asap, but it might take until the end of the business day to get the part to the Bay Area. Meanwhile, the fan, another likely cause of the problem, was just 45 miles away. UPS would have it to my office by 11:15 a.m. A service technician would be there by noon.
That’s not exactly how it played out. A polite tech arrived at my office before 11. The part hadn’t arrived, but he happened to have a new fan with him. He disemboweled my machine, put it back together and timidly knocked on my office door at about 11:40, a working computer – my working computer – in his hand. Within four hours of my call for help, my Thinkpad was repaired.
I suppose there should be some moral to this story. I could have given the Thinkpad up for dead and followed the advice of the crowd. I could have gone to the Apple store, bought a Mac, spent the day at the Genius Bar as a retail geek tried to recover the data from my old hard drive and load up the apps I use every day. I could be here today, trying to find my way around a new OS and recreating files that just couldn’t be recovered from my Windows Vista machine.
Instead, I’ve had a Top 10 best customer support experience. My faith in Lenovo and Thinkpad reinforced. There may come a time when I’ll make the leap to Mac, but this isn’t the week. And given this outstanding experience with Lenovo, I’m guessing that week won’t come for a very long time.
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