I bought a Nokia N82 on the 13th of April 2008 from Croma(Belapur).This march the mobile konked off. The battery drains very fast and it would get hot. So I took it to the Nokia Care center.
It’s the service arm of Nokia in India. There was some confusion so the manager(Rajesh) interfaced and explained to me that the warranty period was over as on7January 2009! Luckily I had the bill from Croma and the ICICI chargeslip which shows the purchase date as 13Apr2008.
Upon looking at these Rajesh said I would need to talk to the retailer and they might be able to get this sorted out. At Croma the bumbling idiot(Saha) was able to assure me that he would take care of it there was only one catch it would take a "little bit of time". in the meanwhile I would be phoneless.
Also he wanted me to get a piece of paper from Nokia saying the warranty was void on 7January2008. I went back to Nokia Care and the manager argued that they could not give me any such peice of paper after a phones warranty is voided. So I called up the head office at Bangalore and explained the case to them. They also agreed that Rajesh should provide this "reciept" saying warranty is void. T
hey asked to talk to the Nokia Care center manager. I put them on the phone(yeah my meter is ticking while internal politics are played out). the store manager shot down the call center guys’ suggestion to give me the receipt citing some rule about no paper after warranty is over. Anyways the battery drained in the middle of the conversation(remember this is the defective phone I am carrying around all this time).
So then Rajesh in some benevolent moment of indiscretion offers to have my phone checked and if it is some thing that can be fixed he also offers to try and get it done under warranty.Turns out it was a couple of ICs which had been damaged by water(am suspecting spillage on the recent Kolkata trip). this anyways voids the warranty so no point following up with anyone as it’ll need to be fixed at cost! Well atleast it saved me a lot of time. Later it turned out that the parts were irreplacable and it cannot be fixed at all and I got that from a couple of techies.
I’m not pissed about the fact that my phone was not fixed, though that is a concern, what really got my cat was the fact that I am talking about Nokia and Croma two of the most respected names in retail. The warranty did not cover the damage is not the issue what if it was something that the warranty could have covered. I am wondering how warranty expired in january 3 months before time. The explanation given by the Croma "bumbling idiot" was that the warranty expired because Croma buys the phones from Nokia and stores at some godown so warranty starts from when Croma buys and not when the end user, thats you and me, buys it from Croma. That’s cheating in my dictionary but then that’s just me.