I Heart HTC

Let me start by saying that the headphones that come with the Nexus One are fantastic. They sound great, plenty of bass, can take a heavy volume beating and not wear out. The sleeve/pouch thingy that comes with the phone, fan of that too, makes me feel like I’m protecting my investment (while cleaning the screen upon insertion and extraction) and it’s got the Android robot on it so that’s extra sweet. Not to mention the phone itself of course, it has a certain God-like quality to it — but we’ve been over this.

So when on the move and pretending to listen to music while actually taking pictures of New York City’s finest femininity, I end up twisting the headphone cord a lot in order to keep it away from the lens and even more when I switch hands, one thing leads to another and now I don’t have headphone button control anymore. Oh and I lost that sleeve, the one with the robot.

I googled Google’s number and gave Google a call, nice guy answered, no foreign accent, gave him the story, he said Hang on while I beam you over to HTC but don’t worry I’ll give them the scoop so you don’t have to repeat it, I’m connected to them in less than a minute (no hold time to get the Google guy either), then a real sweetheart named Nicole picks up as the Google guy introduces me. I mean a take-home-to-Mom kinda gal, this Nicole woman. Long story less long, Nicole hooked me up with a free headset replacement and a free sleeve, on the house and on its way to me through FedEx, the Cadillac of parcel services.

I gave her my email, she got curious about the batteryboss.org domain, I gave her the scoop on my awesome website which blows the lid of the third party battery underground to the world that HTC batteries are the best and the third party batteries are ripoffs and ebay is a den of thieves. That got her fired up about how she deals with people buying these batteries then complaining to her about their phone not lasting as long, yada yada, then she says she’ll be pushing the news of my site and its revelations up the chain of command, high fiving me verbally. This flattered and pleased me.

As we wrapped up, she asked me if I’d mind taking a little survey about our interaction, I said sure, she explained how the one to five scale worked, I interrupted, “Nicole, you know I’m just going to give you fives across the board without even listening to the questions, go ahead and lay those fives down for me.” She laughed — which I like in a sweetheart Southern sounding customer support rep, understanding my sophisticated humor, who’s giving me free stuff. I bet she’s sort of pretty too, maybe. That was so great a customer service experience I had to smoke a cigarette afterward, you know what I mean?

I noted that I was surprised to stumble upon a company that would just let me have the headphones and the sleeve for free, the modest expense of the items notwithstanding. She said that’s just how HTC operates, wants to make customers happy and avoid nickel and diming them. She then offered me an opportunity which I took to leave any comments or suggestions on this survey. I just said (addressing HTC) to keep on doing what you’re doing and you’ll continue to turn your success into domination.

And to stay friendly with Google.

Doug Simmons