Being the friendly geek that I am, I offered to remove the hard-drive and connect it to one of my PC’s and get the data off it. No problem. I thought. It was only afterwards that I remembered that laptops use a 2.5 inch drive – with a different connector than a standard 3.5 inch IDE drive. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so you’ll have to excuse my faux pas. I knew that I needed an adaptor, but where to get one in Limerick?

This is where Maplin came in. I did a quick search on their UK website and located the part number. One quick call to their Limerick store, and they confirmed that they had the part in stock, and reserved it for me. I was in and out of the store in less than five minutes with the adaptor I needed. Perfect service.

Compare this to the service I got in PC World later on. I had in my possession a gift certificate for €75. A friend had previously bought some memory there that was not compatible with his PC, and they wouldn’t give him his cash back, just this gift certificate. So he gave me the gift voucher in exchange for buying the memory online. I went into PC World today with the intention of spending just the amount on the voucher. I knew what I wanted – a PC repair kit.

I found the kit easily enough, but there was no price on it. There were two members of staff standing on the floor, talking to each other. So I approached them, and asked them the price. Their response? “Go ask at the till”. I was stunned. Here are two guys with obviously nothing to do, and here am I a customer with a pretty simple request – I’m so sorry, I was under the impression that given that you work here, and that as don’t seem to have anything to do, you might be able to at least check for me. If it wasn’t for the fact that my voucher is only valid for PC World, I would have gone somewhere else.

In the last six months alone, I think I’ve spent the bones of about €3,000 euro with them. And every time that I go in there, it’s the same story. Crap service, each and every time. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are the only PC store in the area, I wouldn’t bother going back.

I’m sick and tired of companies who do nothing but take your money and and all you get in return is the impression that you should be glad that they’re even doing that. Whatever happened to customer service? I work with customers every day, and I certainly don’t think that “The customer is always right”. In fact quite the opposite, customers are frequently wrong, but that’s still no excuse for treating them like muppets. If a stranger walked up to you in the street and was willing to give you €75, do you not think that at the very least you’d manage a smile and say thanks?

Obviously, a lot of companies wouldn’t think so. They’d probably demand more money. With menaces. Is it so hard to treat people with a bit of common decency and respect?

So if you want proper customer service, go to Maplin, if you want to be treated like a muppet, so to PC World. I know where I’d prefer to go.

And after all of that, it took about ten minutes to get the data off the drive and burn it to CD.