By this time, many of you are likely familiar with me, but for those of you who aren’t:
I am Sam Anthony, CEO here at the Twin Cities Agenda. When I am not contributing to the Agenda, I run a digital agency called TheSiteEdge, where we build websites and help drive traffic to existing ones.
As you might guess, due to the lines of work that I am involved in, I pretty much rely on my laptop day and night. It has a lot of important stuff on it. Stuff that allows me to grow our clients’ online presences and stuff that keeps our business functioning.
In fact there is too much stuff on it and I stink at backing up all of the data because I think I am busy and that there is always something more important to do. And we have nice, shiny, new MacBook Pro laptops, so it’s not like it is going to just die randomly on me.
Dummy. Seriously, like total dummy.
Yea, it died on me. Not only did it die, but it died in the final hours leading up to a huge meeting with the biggest potential client we had ever had the chance to work with.
I was going to close the sh** out of that client. I was confident. I was prepped. I had charts, graphs, and lists upon lists of stuff that we would be able to fix for them.
But it was all on my laptop. [Forehead Slap]
I immediately rescheduled my meeting for a week out, knowing there was a strong chance it would cost our company a new client. But there was no other choice.
Since my laptop was still under warranty, I shipped it off to Apple for a free repair. They got it a day later and promptly informed me that there was clear evidence of liquid damage. What?
It had been working perfectly for 6+ months and I did not spill anything on it that day. Then it hit me — I had spilled coffee on my desk about a month after I got the laptop. It must have seeped in through the vents on the side of the laptop, but not significantly enough to cause immediate damage. Well the moisture caused corrosion over time which randomly caused my laptop to stop charging on that fateful day.
Apple does not cover liquid damage under warranty. And on top of it, they said they would need to replace everything inside the cover. $1300. There are 2 things wrong with this:
- I could almost buy a new one for that price.
- I knew it was just the charging port that was busted.
So I had them ship it back to me — I received it a day later and proceeded to search for local repair shops that would try to fix just the one part that I knew was broken. Nobody would do it because of liability concerns.
As a last resort, I called a friend who runs an IT services company and she told me to just take it into Device Pitstop. That if anyone could fix it, it would be them.
I drove straight to the Maple Grove Device Pitstop location and spoke with a very knowledgeable staff member. She said that they could try to take a part out of a different dead MacBook and replace mine with it. She also assured me that in the worst case scenario, they could get all the data off of my laptop onto a flash drive.
She warned me that they can’t guarantee the part since it was from an older machine. I told her to go for it and I headed back to the office.
I got a call not even an hour later saying it was fixed, charging perfectly, and that the cost would be less than $100.
Shut the front door. Nobody else would do this and they did it in an hour for less than $100.
My experience had been so good that I felt compelled to do something nice for them. On my way back, I stopped at the Redstone Grill in Maple Grove and picked up a $50 gift card for them. I can honestly say that I have never done something like that for a random person at a store. I am not a selfish person, but I wouldn’t say I am overly thoughtful when it comes to showing gratitude. This was different. This was the perfect experience.
Call me a cheeseball. I don’t care. Device Pitstop customer for life.
We closed the client 5 days later. Not kidding.
Ever since this experience, I have been stalking Device Pitstop to sponsor the Twin Cities Agenda. Now they do 🙂
And there is nothing better than having a sponsor that you truly believe in and can promote with confidence.
Details on Device Pitstop:
- Headquartered right here in Minnetonka
- 5 Twin Cities locations (click a link below to get phone #)
- 15 locations in the US
- Services
- Repair: Phones, computers, laptops, and tablets
- They give you cash for devices you no longer use
- They have refurbished devices for sale (phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops)
- They have tons of cell phone accessories
- Several of them repair drones and video game consoles
- They are the bomb. I dare you to attempt to disprove me.
