When a laptop you made starts melting ...

... wouldn't it be a good idea to show a bit of contrition and urgency in sorting things for the customer?

My daughter's 11-month-old HP Pavilion G6 laptop started pouring out white smoke and melted an 8mm hole in the black plastic casing:


melted a SODIMM card, and damaged the chassis:


HP's reaction:

* Ask - almost before anything else - whether we had commenced legal proceedings against them
* Check no personal injury or damage to other property
* Take comprehensive other info (including weather conditions at the time of melting!)
* Ask for photos

... and warn that it would then take 48 hours (presumably not including weekends) to process the report and photos - because they needed "to consider all the information very carefully". Not just a wretchedly lazy turnaround time, but an insult to the intelligence. 

They don't have to grow a culture or take a Geiger counter reading. They have to read the words that their agent has added to a database and they need to look at a handful of photos I have sent them. How can it take 48 hours to look at that? I wonder whether that promised reaction time would have been faster if we had a leg injury to show to the press, or a lawyer champing at the bit? Just having a rather frightening incident and an unusable product doesn't seem to warrant any particular urgency.

If I made an item that sometimes melted when sitting on customers' legs (and had in the past brought me bad publicity by bursting into flames), I really think I would pull out the stops to speed up repair/replacement action.

I started reporting the incident at 1330 Friday (it then took 45 minutes queueing and answering questions) and had the photos back to them - to the email address they had specified - by 1420. 

And - no surprise - the rest of Friday passed by with no action. So, I guess it will be Monday (at best) before anyone thinks of starting to arrange a collection, which will be Tuesday ... and so a failure which is already embarrassing causes more inconvenience than needs be.

How confident HP must be about their market reputation and customer loyalty to feel so relaxed about sorting things out for customers with alarming problems!

Update after waiting one full working day: still no response, so I called Customer Service. The response now quoted is "up to three days" - explained by telling me that the problem "has to be investigated carefully" and "it has to be sent to another office". You couldn't make it up.

Final update - HP didn't even manage to get back to me in THREE working days. When I called them again, an engineer did look into it (while I waited on hold) and decided that the metal object that appears to have short-circuited the SODIMM memory module wasn't anything to do with HP because it wasn't a shape that he (or a colleague) recognised. He could only suggest that PC World (who fitted the extra SODIMM at time of purchase) must have used a metal clip to hold the memory in place - an explanation that I find unlikely in the extreme. I'm not stuck - PC World are repairing it under their extended warranty - but I am left having wasted five days, without even the satisfaction that HP have identified a credible cause.