Don’t Blame Your Customer If You Sold Them Faulty Equipment

Wednesday June 25, 2008 • 4 Comments 

Last night I got a call from someone I occasionally do computer work for, and he provided me with a story that I felt I needed to blog about.  I’m not giving any names, and it might become obvious why a little later.

He had just purchased a new 12 megapixel Canon camera, along with a card reader so that he wouldn’t have to drain batteries when pulling photos off of the camera.  He had about 30 pictures on the card in JPEG format, about 4MB apiece, so about 120MB give or take.

While he was copying the images off the card on to his machine, he noticed that it was taking a LONG time to pull each image off.  About two minutes per image.  So he called up the camera shop where he bought both the camera and the reader, and spoke to their "computer guy", who asked about his PC.  He told them that it was a four year old Dell, running XP SP3 with 1GB of memory, and lots of free space on the disk.

"Oh, no," he was told.  "That machine is too old for something as intensive as that.  It should be upgraded or replaced.  It can’t handle something like what you’re trying to do."  He asked if the card reader could be bad, but was told that, no, it was the PC.

Excuse me??  I’m not trying to paint all camera dealers with the same brush here, but this is why you don’t go to a camera shop to ask about problems with your PC, even if the problem is related to your camera.  To prove this to myself, I fired up my Olympus E-10 and shot 30 RAW images (11MB each) and put the card in my generic $19 card reader plugged into my four year old whitebox machine running XP SP3 with 756MB of RAM.  Took about 3-4 minutes to copy all 300+ MB.

So, he pulled the card out of the reader, put it back in the camera, and plugged that into his "decrepit" PC.  It took less than a minute to copy all of the photos off.

It was a bad card reader.

So, please, if you don’t want to admit that you sold a piece of broken gear, don’t try and shift the blame to the user’s existing gear, or put the blame on them.  Because it’ll really come back to bite you someday if someone finds out about it (and blogs about it, too).