 All right everybody so I'm gonna be really honest and tell you I wasn't Entirely sure whether I was gonna even make this episode and show you kind of this terrible experience I recently had but it's been a few months I've had some time to calm down and kind of give myself some retrospective and I've definitely learned a few things So I figured that hey even my mistakes may be beneficial to you I also wanted to tell you some about my current customer service experience later on First off though, let's talk about Box right here. It is a FedEx box FedEx delivery and look this was a return to me. So You may remember a couple months ago. I did a Restoration of a Sony 1943 MD and I'm not gonna tag to all the videos here, but I will tag to this one in the comments I mean the description. This is me actually packing this exact PVM the first You know ten minutes or me packing it and and showing how I packed it and I've gone back and look at back and see and So we're gonna talk a little bit about basically the return from here but this one did get sold on eBay and it was packed and ultimately shipped up to Seattle Washington to the Seattle Washington area and So this is what it looked like when I dropped it off to FedEx the FedEx FedEx store actually inspected it and everything and this was cool I mean this was like the fourth one. I'd actually shipped over the last little bit So anyway, if you want to go check that out to seeds too, but this was This was kind of an unexpected but a little bit may be expected kind of outcome But this is what it literally looked like after it was shipped to Seattle and Then it was damaged some in transit to Seattle and then the Seattle FedEx came and picked it up from the receivers address and didn't take all the packaging back threw it back in this box halfway and brought it all the way back here to me in Tennessee so First off I will well first off I will open the box and I'll show you What it looks like so again if you want to go back or if you've already seen that video of me packing this You can look at that and you could see how it was sent back to me Now it was kind of a complete mess as far as it went with this claim because This one ultimately sold on eBay. It was not too expensive. Honestly. Thankfully maybe for me I was lucky on this one that it was only sold for like $380 which is really low for a 20 inch monitor. However, it was really old It did have some scratches on the screen. I did recap all the boards and everything in it but it thankfully actually didn't sell for a whole lot because I had to refund the money here and Try to file a claim with FedEx and we'll talk about that more at the end as we go through Unpacking here first. You just noticed that the PVM is pretty much just thrown in here in this box This is the box that I shipped it in but it's pretty worn out I Lifted the whole monitor out here, but there's very little of the packing material left probably One fourth to one third of what I originally wrapped it in So That's how much packaging was taken back by the driver I was not expecting the driver to not take all the packaging back, but Unfortunately, the guy who bought it from me. He was very nice and very helpful But FedEx was very difficult to deal with here where they did not They weren't the greatest to communicate with of course. We did have the whole Pandemic going on so that's just kind of made it a little bit worse. It was really at the beginning of that and So here's we got it. I mean, I'm just going to go through here And the reason I'm even open in this is because it's been a while and I want to salvage some of these parts if at all possible But the big splitter and look at this plastic right here We're going to take a quick look here at this this unbelievable this All this broken plastic. This is the entire bezel For the 1943 MD. It was just completely shattered in the bottom of this box as well, there's also a lot of plastic from the back plastic plate on there, so there's a lot of just Broken plastic piles of it in here So I did look through it and make sure to not miss anything that was important There were a couple little plug-in boards that were in here I wanted to get any kind of screws or really rivets Those little plastic rivets are hard to come by and so I definitely found I think five or six of those almost all of them on The rivets, but the it's just unbelievable how bad This was banged around and here we have the actual monitor itself It was just a disaster. You can tell here You know, thankfully I was expecting it to look awful But they actually shoved just like pieces of foam inside here Everything was just smashed to bits the neck board I could already tell had been Collapsed in and just crushed it was broken into like 20 pieces here was held together from the other components, but just really a wreck and then The other circuit boards didn't look much better and the tube even had a lot of damage to the back of it right here so it was not a pretty sight inside there and Honestly, I'm gonna tell you at the end what I ended up doing with the parts here and what I was able to salvage But I could already tell there wasn't much if you just look at the flyback here very good flyback still and hopefully You know, thankfully this was kind of salvageable, but it was actually on a circuit board now. It's just free-floating and Just an utter mess so You're always taking this risk when you ship especially a 20 inch monitor across the country like I did Here's the boards. Look at the circuit boards I finally got them all out and broken down and they are broken Now look where my finger is if you look in real close here. I'll try to get pause it this dimple where my cursor is that dimple is a A port of the circuit board that's just cracked in and there's there's multiple places on the circuit board that are like that where it's just been crushed and Potentiometers were ripped off down here so The boards are Rex. They're pretty much unusable, but since I did recap these boards and they were never really used I'm gonna take all the capacitors out of them because there's a lot of I mean, it's like $80 worth of good capacitors that I replaced not too long ago I'm gonna keep those so I'll pull those capacitors out of all these boards and None of the boards looked really good. None of them. But the power board may have been okay, but to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure so the sorry some crazy bugs flying around in the shop tonight and Super warm weather down here in Tennessee. You never know. What's gonna crawl out of the ground down here But anyway, the tube was shot the I got it all broken down the circuit boards, you know, we're trashed Except for a couple boards. We're gonna go through some parts here that I was able to salvage But just a big wreck. So here's some parts to take a look at this is the flyback assembly And I definitely saved it because it did not crack. It looked to be good shape It had a clean break right at the circuit board. So it could should be easy to desolder that but that's kind of a rare part and So it's definitely something I want to hold on to and it's still in good shape I was able to serve the save the front button board and might not ever come in handy, but you never know so I did save it and Then I was able to save the yoke because the yokes are Almost indestructible this position there in it rarely gets damaged. So this one was in pretty good shape So I'll keep that and of course there was the back input board With the inputs and it's a stacked board, but it really didn't take any damage to so I kept it There's a nice power cord that comes with this one So that was definitely salvageable Even if you're just taking these and salvaging it like a salvage yard for Scrap metal. This is very high quality components that will get you, you know 20 bucks in salvage parts for sure at the scrap yard to be honest a lot of copper in here So here's some other stuff. I was able to save we'll get a closer look here in a second I was able to save some stuff from the tube like the spacers behind the yoke and the tube a lot of hardware the good stuff is Hard to get you know, you want to keep a lot of that good Sony hardware if you can get it Also got some purity magnets off the back of the tube a lot of those rivets of course, I kept the Sony emblem which made it back thankfully and Just some more screws and then I did get the conversion strips off there too. So I'll clean all that stuff up and We'll get it, you know, I'll recycle it in other Restorations where I can use it again. These rivets are very difficult to find I'm never even fine found a really good replacement. So I'm glad to get at least those out of it And it just shows that even when something's a pile of junk you can get something out of it if you're You know working on these kind of things regularly But that and then the tube spacers, you know, those are It's always nice to get extra things like that too because you can't really buy that kind of stuff anymore I also did pull out all the cabling this is the Degas cable and the rest of the cabling that went between the printed circuit boards and There's the circuit boards and again Just going to take the capacitors out of those and thankfully I already had a job lined up Here's a close look at these circuit boards again, but I already had somebody else send me their chassis and everything to recap so I was able to repurpose all those parts and recap this gentleman's entire monitor and So thankfully it wasn't a complete loss I was able to get as much as physically possible out of it Considering I was able to get my capacitors that I had used in the last job out of it too and use it in this recap job here Which I completed. Oh again within a day So it was a good. There's a good learning experience to salvage, you know, something that was just complete garbage Rather than just you know accepting that it was gone now. I did want to talk to you a little bit about my customer service experience and Unfortunately, this one again was shipped with FedEx, but they did just I don't really want to get into it over the top and you know, it's been months now I've already accepted the fact that they have decided to just completely deny any claim here and it's fine But they just really handled it such it's such a poor manner that I Close my account with them and I'm not shipping with them anytime in the foreseeable future, you know, even before this particular Transaction happened that was this bad one I had a couple other shipments go kind of dodgy and they were doing some weird stuff with the tracking it was Packages were showing up as delivered and they weren't actually delivered until a day later Which was kind of weird and when you're dealing with expensive items You don't don't really want to mess with that and if you do ship them you want to make sure you get good customer service So this is just a screenshot of how many times I had to call them This was after I filed a claim through FedEx.com. This is the FedEx customer service number You can see here how many calls I made That's starting all the way back on April 3rd. Just to check in after I had initially filed the claim and Many of these days where I'd call and then call right back on this like days where I'd call three times four times five this day They kept hanging up on me They would hang up on me again and again and then I'd asked to talk to Somebody in a customer service or somebody that was a superior and they'd send me to I'm not even kidding. They sent me to a call center overseas and the guy did, you know, he didn't speak very well English and He basically said that he wasn't above the guy who had trafficked, you know Transfer me to him and then so that was really like the last call. I remained on the line and What ultimately happened there was that was on May 15th. He can tell that call was Almost 30 minutes long. I had to wait on hold twice for 20 minutes of that and the other time was me talking to People and then I finally got to a third supervisor because they made me speak to three supervisors just to Politely request to cancel my account with them because I didn't want to deal with them anymore So it was a big hassle just to even cancel my account. You couldn't do it online. You couldn't do it You know just by calling or going to the store and then when I actually had a problem We had to try to talk to some of the stores locally because they were Involved in the transactions and they approved the packing and they pretty much just you know hung us out to dry They didn't really help us at all And so the whole thing was just about a poor customer service experience and I can't use them anymore Unfortunately, I can't trust them to treat to transport my high-end monitors and You know have them show up looking like this and I and you know, they this is of course looks a lot worse This came all the way back, but and again, I do agree that I Probably could have done better on the packing but The point I'm trying to make a guess is that if you're a large large large company like FedEx and you you know talk about customer service as being a focal point and you have the Staff and you make, you know, you a multi global national company that's making lots of money and Almost has a monopoly not a complete monopoly, but but there's not very many options to ship. So When you're like that and then you actually have a trouble and you get more of a run-around and it wasn't I mean basically I Submitted the claim online. They immediately denied it and they Then I had to call and ask them why and they said they didn't get enough pictures Even though I had sent them the video and I'd sent them probably 12 pictures of the packing they said they didn't get enough pictures, so I re-sent them three or four times and They still you know I'd call and try to follow up and they would transfer me or they would hang up on me and then they would I would call To try to follow up all the photos. So, you know, I could tell you know I could go deeper into how the whole thing went it just went down that Spiral where they would just deny it and they said they would Reopen an appeal after they initially denied it. They just said, you know, well, we just initially deny them We initially denied this one and now you have to open an appeal and then they never answered the appeal The last notice I got said they were still looking at the appeal As late as June 1st and then they never followed up with me again and I've pretty much You know salvage what I could out of it Learned what I could out of it and changed what I can do out of it And now hopefully after this long video you can understand how difficult it still is to ship these properly and You know for the time being I'd kind of just put all the responsibility on FedEx or UPS or whatever shipper you have to use You can either you'll either have to overpack it to where I'm talking like Strap it to a pallet after you packed it in a box You'll have to do that kind of a drop shipment or you'll have to take it to FedEx or to UPS and tell them they have to pack it and then ensure it for you know Two or three times the value Ensure it for $3,000 if you're shipping a 20 inch monitor that way they'll make sure and pack it To know that they're you know on the hook for a lot of money in a big case if something does happen Because right now I mean if you don't you this was a lot of money I put into packing in time and it ultimately didn't even work out. So anyway let me know what you think if you've had any bad experiences feel free to share them below and Hopefully, you know, we can all learn from this and do better next time. I know I will so thanks again for watching guys I'll see you next time with some more retro content