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Last night my oldest daughter, Mia, did what I think took a lot of courage. She got up in front of  about 100 people (parents, kids, grandparents) and sang the song Hey There Delilah. If you know the song, you know there’s lots of words that go by pretty fast and the melody itself requires a fairly wide vocal range. While slightly more timid than usual, she sang with her usual grace and sweetness. She is my favorite singer.

Mia is no stranger to the stage. This summer, she’ll be attending another season of her theater camp and will be performing in her tenth play. Last night was a less formal setting (part of a 70s themed  end-of-the-year celebration at her after school program), but she still brought her game. I’m very, very proud of her. It was such a delight to have parents tell me after the fact how wonderfully she sang and how brave she was to do it.

The glow of yesterday’s customer support triumph with Samsung has worn off. I sit here in the “business office” of my local Honda dealership awaiting the completion of my 2007 Odyssey Touring minivan’s 60,000-mile checkup. The cost for the basic service was going to be roughly $400.

But the attendant has just visited and informed me that I need new tires. My vehicle will not pass inspection because the tires are worn from poor alignment. But that’s just the beginning of the story.

This car has what are known as PAX tires. Some people know them as run-flat tires. Their claim is that even without air, these tires maintain their shape and their ability to be driven on for many miles. It’s the special frames that allow this. The vehicle also has an impressive monitoring system for these tires. As you might imagine, these tires are very expensive.

But here’s where the fun starts. There’s a class action suit against Honda and Michelin because of these tires. People buying cars with them have been misinformed about their life expectancy. The tires themselves, while excessively priced, are also very hard to replace because there are very few dealerships with the equipment to do so. I got a notice in the mail a few weeks back from a law firm in the Midwest offering me to join in the suit. I have to fill out some paperwork and send it back to them. I imagine, like most lawsuits, I may get fifty cents or so while the lawyers themselves take in millions.

So, my $400 service call now is $1300 (tires and parts, installation, rotation, balancing, blah blah blah). There’s no lawyer here helping me to bargain or talk the dealers down. I will likely have to do this again in 20,000 miles or so (not the advertised 35,000 miles).

I’ve been a very loyal customer of Honda cars for years. In fact, since the junky Subaru I drove after college, all my cars have been Hondas. But this is the end of the road. I’m done with them. I’ll need another car next year when my other Honda finally times out. But it’ll be something else. Something without proprietary equipment that hoses me for years to come.

I apologize for the screaming headline to this post, but I use all caps to emphasize the most amazing thing that happened to me.

I have three monitors on my computer. I do lots of design and testing on browsers, I write a lot, I work with imaging. So all this extra real estate works for me. I use all Samsung monitors because I have always loved their clarity, crispness, and reliability. The two to the sides are widescreen and the center one is more standard. They all are flat-screen at extremely high resolutions.

All this said, the center one has been giving me trouble lately. When booting up, it flashes on, then just as quickly goes black. By hitting the On/Off switch (or the Source button) repeatedly it eventually comes back to a working state. But this situation has degraded and it now takes many more times to get the thing working each day. I tried everything I could think of: installing new drivers, attaching new cables, checking and testing the graphics card. Nothing. So, I finally decide to call Samsung directly for advice (advice, because I’ve had the monitor for two years and my expectation is that that is about all I’ll get).

I call Samsung and within seconds am talking to a monitor expert. Right there, you got me excited. No long hold times, no uninformed “technician.” I describe my situation in detail, tell him all the solutions I tried. He then asks me, would I prefer a service call or an exchange? I am silent. I tell him I don’t understand the question. He repeats it. I say that, sure, I’d love an exchange. He takes down my address, phone number, and email. He then tells me that in about seven days a new monitor will arrive at the UPS store just a mile or so from here. Bring my old monitor there, they will give me the new monitor, repack the old one, and ship it back. Free.

Let that roll around in your head for a moment. Two year-old monitor, exchanged and replaced for free. Within in days. Transaction complete within five minutes. I don’t know, if you’ve had a better customer support experience, I’d like to hear it. You only hear the horror stories about flight check crews and mobile phone vendors. I don’t care what happens over the next 14 hours, I’m having a damn good day.

Oh, and Sprint, Overstock.com, ATI, Charter, First Data: Please call Samsung and beg them to let you know how they do it.

Update: Monitor arrived yesterday, but couldn’t pick it up until today. That’s three days from when Samsung promised to send it. It is a newer model and the picture is remarkably crisp and clear, definitely an upgrade.