14 DAY TRIAL // Losing a laptop must be painful, but when somebody else goes through the trouble of loving you it must be nearly insupportable. Raelyn Campbell one day sent hers to the shop for one defection, while under warranty and never saw it back. Her repeated phone calls for details on when it would be ready went on for about four months before somebody had the heart to tell her it was lost.
After talking to a pleiad of employees over the May - August period who all assured her that it was being worked upon, or that it had been sent to another branch of Best Buy, the company where she had bought the laptop from, one 'Cicero' told her that apparently it never left the local shop. Working for a nonprofit Asian research firm and being forced to travel frequently overseas, Campbell could not take the long and pointless wait for granted, so she decided to ask to be compensated.
Best Buy offered a $900 store gift card for an $1,100 laptop and a supplemental $300 for extended warranty that she was convinced to buy. Seeing red before her eyes, Raelyn at first asked for $2,100 in cash and when her request went unanswered, she turned to the law and went to the Washington, D.C. attorney general's office and complained. Her action prompted the shop to increase their 'generous' offer to a $1,100 refund to her credit card and a $500 gift card. It was already November by now, so the company must have thought that 7 months of waiting were worth about $200.
A bigger problem for Campbell was revealed when she contacted a lawyer at a legal aid office, who informed her that she might be the victim of ID theft, had she had personal information stored on the laptop's hard drive. Of course she did, and that was the limit to her patience: Raelyn filed the $54 million lawsuit by herself, without any legal representation. Best Buy's response? A $2,500 increase to the previous offer.
"It shouldn't take a $54 million lawsuit to motivate Best Buy to address these issues," she said, but wouldn't budge, going on with the lawsuit as planned.