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Sometimes you find a variety of employees at a company. Some that will help, and some that would not hand you a bucket of water if you were on fire. I have had two instances of this in my trials and tribulations with companies.
The first was with a satellite TV company. My DVR was mysteriously deleting content that I had recorded (somewhat similar to the Kindle problem we are discussing). Normal tech support channels, yeah, it was the same old "we've never heard of this happening before". They didn't seem interested in pursuing the problem. But one time, I got a hold of a tech support person who actually seemed to care. They asked, "would you be willing to allow one of our engineers into your house to troubleshoot directly on your DVR?" My first thought was, "Yeah right, you're really gonna send an engineer out to my place!" But I said, sure, send someone out. The next day I indeed got a phone call from an engineer and we arranged a time for him to come out. He brought his laptop and plugged that into the back of my DVR. Right into that USB port that they say doesn't do anything, and is just there for future expansion. Yeah, that one. After a while digging around in my DVR via this laptop link, the guy said, "I think I see what might be happening". He thanked me for letting him come out and we exchanged good-byes. My DVR never deleted a recording (on it's own accord) again. I do not know if this was pure coincidence, or if some fix was added to the routine firmware upgrades they do based on that engineer troubleshooting at my place. My point is that I eventually ran into employees who DID care, after having to fight my way through other employees who did not care. That's the way it goes sometimes.
The second instance was with a new lawn mover I bought. The thing never ran right. It was a high end model. The dealer I bought it from was zero help. Almost laughing at me when I pointed out the problems with the mower. So I tried the trick of calling the manufacturer directly. You look up their main published phone number, and then dial other numbers that are one or two digits off from that main number. Often times you will ruin into their fax number, but often times you will run into one of their high level execs. I think it's an ego thing - they want to have a phone number/extension that is right off the main number as some kind of corporate status symbol. I saw this over and over when configuring phone systems for companies, back when I was involved in that. So ... I ended up talking with one of the company VP's. He was aghast at hearing how I had been treated. He offered me a new mower from their line, but I would have to wait 3 months since they had switched their production line over to building a different mower brand. Every bit as high end as the line I bought, apparently this company owns and manufactures several different customer brands. He said if I didn't want to wait the three months for the brand I bought to go back into production, I could have any mower I wanted from one of their other lines. You should have seen the dealers face when I rolled in my poorly working mower and told him that the company had shipped me this new replacement that he was holding for a customer (me!) The look on his face was worth the effort I had expended to get a replacement mower.
My point in bringing this up being, you can't always call an entire company a dog because of the actions of some of its employees. Think about what it would be like to be one of the techs at a company responding to incoming customer calls. A zillion each day. Most all of them angry. It would be a horrible job. I can see them lumping their entire customer base into one obnoxious group, same as we customers lump all their employees into one unhelpful group. Calling in and then telling them to pound sand and that you weren't going to be an uncompensated guinea pig probably got you lumped into the obnoxious customer group, even though you felt yourself to be in a different group.
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