Customer:\r
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“I went up there to pick it up, and I realize that a tech in training named Johnny is the one that worked on it the entire time. From the few minutes I talked to him, I could tell he wasn't very knowledgeable, and wasn't really sure what he was doing.”\r
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Johnny Phillips T.S. Service Technician:\r
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The customer did not specify that he wanted a specific tech to work on the unit. Although I did not have specific experience on this model, Technical Services has schematics and manuals to service this machine. I have 20 + years experience working as a bench repair tech in the electronics industry and our General Manager John Eldridge, has lots of experience servicing these machines.\r
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The Tascam MSR-16 is a very labor intensive unit to troubleshoot and adjust. Because it is a 2-head machine instead of a 3-head, each of the 16 tracks must be individually adjusted without the ability to monitor the adjustments until playback. This means the tech must guess at each adjustment and play it back to see if the adjustment was within specification. In this particular case, there were six (6) adjustments per channel (x 16), totaling 96 separate adjustments. It took days to accomplish this because adjustments could not be made until the channels were checked and the needed repairs made.\r
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I was taking time to ensure each step in the trouble shooting process was successful. So, if as the customer has indicated, I wasn’t talking to him much, it was because I didn’t want to upset him more than he already was. I decided to allow management to communicate with him hoping they could better assure him all was being done while I kept working on his machine. \r
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Customer:\r
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“Technical Services never gave me a quote at any point during the process, even though I repeatedly asked for one… When I found out the machine was done, they were trying to charge me more than I paid for the entire machine.”\r
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Johnny Phillips T.S. Service Technician:\r
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John Eldridge was updating the customer, but new problems kept developing – making it difficult to estimate. For instance, after adjusting all 16 channels (96 separate adjustments) the tracks started acting flaky. We addressed the problem and started the adjustments all over again. We did not charge for the actual labor time when we saw how long it was taking. We were being pushed by the customer to finish, yet we had already invested unreasonable amounts of time that we could not recover. We ran the unit extensively to be sure it was solid enough to turn back to the customer.\r
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Customer:\r
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I asked to speak to the owner, named Bruce. He tried to make me feel like an idiot for asking them to lower the price, saying ""This is a legacy piece. John was designing studios in the 60s; you're going to be VERY HAPPY with the work being done.""\r
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Johnny Phillips T.S. Service Technician:\r
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In all fairness, I believe I was the one, not Bruce, who brought up the fact that John Eldridge was designing studios in the 1960’s. Having gone to great lengths to fully checkout the unit, I suggested that the customer would be VERY HAPPY with the work being done.\r
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