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Making Customer Service Great Again: Western Razor
I like David Angelo’s sense of humor. I enjoy seeing his frequent appearances on Gutfeld episodes that some anonymous Vietnamese dude uploads to YouTube.
So in 2022, when I heard he had started a company called Western Razor to make razor handles in the US, I bought one. One day, I noticed a bit of plating chipping off the front guard. I sent a message asking if they sold replacement parts.
I received a reply almost immediately from a cat named Mike, saying they didn’t sell individual parts, and that my razor was out of warranty, but he would send me a replacement part free of charge. He asked for a pic of the razor.
From that picture, he noticed another scratch on the back plate and offered to send that too. I told him that I appreciated it, and that he could send it to my parent’s house in Oklahoma, because mailing them to Korea might be a bit expensive.
He mailed them to Korea, at no cost to me. Western Razor is one sharp American company.
In a more high-tech vein, years ago I was working on setting up a home LAN server using a Gateway computer in a full-tower case that could hold several internal hard drives. At that time, 36 or 72 gig was about the biggest you could get, especially with SCSI. And I had to use SCSI because IDE didn’t allow enough devices.
On my own, I upgraded the CPU to the maximum speed that motherboard would support (486-133, as I recall) and installed the expanded motherboard cache that had never been there before. (L2 cache makes a big difference but if you want to see even a supposedly fast CPU crawl like you wouldn’t believe, try disabling L1!)
The down-side of that experience was that Gateway was no help at all, they wouldn’t even sell me a replacement original keyboard let alone a panel-lock key, unless I had the receipt showing I was the original purchaser. Somehow I was able to find details on the motherboard, but back then it wasn’t as easy as it is now. I guess Gateway is no longer that rigid, but they were then.
However the plus side was that I had decided to use a Q-Logic SCSI controller card. “Everybody knows” the name Adaptec, but actually a lot of high-end systems back then used Q-Logic. And I liked the way everything… “felt” about it. Adaptec seemed stuffy, like “We deserve your business Because.”
I was going to use FreeBSD, and as it happened, everything worked fine until I tried to connect a 36-gig SCSI drive. Doing that, I would get a “kernel panic” error.
After checking everything else, I contacted Q-Logic and found out the card had an obsolete “BIOS” on it. It couldn’t handle anything over 8 gig. (Which is also the FAT32 limit, although I wasn’t using FAT32.)
Even though I was just some random guy on disability, and I hadn’t even bought the card myself originally, and there was no way I could update it “in the field,” they FedEx’d me an updated BIOS chip. (And FedEx was something of a bigger deal then, too.)
I recommend Q-Logic to anyone who will listen.
David Angelo seems like a good guy on Gutfield. He must train his employees well!
His short economics videos on You Tube are really good.