Is it broken? Who's to blame? Firm sorts out cellphone issues for clients

February 4, 2006

By Terry Maxon / The Dallas Morning News

The technician dispassionately turns my cellphone from front to back, side to side, as she looks it over. She scans its bar codes. She looks at the white dot under the internal battery.

Nathan Hunsinger / DMN Diagnostic testing helps determine what's wrong with a phone at ATC Logistics & Electronics.

I'm sweating it as I wait for her decision.

I'm visiting ATC Logistics & Electronics' sprawling plant to personally follow my phone through triage, diagnosis and verdict. It's more than professional curiosity — it's potentially more than $200 out of my pocket.

I liked my 7-month-old Motorola RAZR. But the RAZR's keys aren't raised, making the backlight on the keyboard essential if I wanted to use it in the dark. And my RAZR's keyboard quit lighting up shortly after I got it in June 2005.

The device is covered by a one-year warranty, but that assumes I've been a good boy. If the five-minute evaluation concludes that I had dunked, punted, crushed or otherwise abused my Motorola RAZR, I'll have to pay $210 to Cingular.

But my replacement, which I received a few days earlier, is free if the technician decides I wasn't responsible for the damage.

High stakes indeed for a little phone and its owner.

Technicians at the facility put tens of thousands of phones through the same process every day, separating the working phones from the non-working, those covered by warranty from non-warranty, the phones returned within 30 days from the ones that came back later.

The plant is a tremendous Santa's Workshop, except the elves are about 1,450 employees from the Fort Worth, Texas, area and the toys are cellphones from a variety of clients, including cellular companies Cingular Wireless LLC and T-Mobile USA and manufacturers Motorola, LG Electronics, Nokia and Samsung.

Nathan Hunsinger / DMN A red dot on a cellphone indicates water damage — and a voided warranty.

The facility, which handled over 3 million phones in 2005, will receive, ship, inspect, repair and otherwise handle nearly 4 million phones this year — new and used, perfect and irreparable.

ATCLE leases more than a half-million square feet of space in North Fort Worth. It moved its triage and repair facility into a new building less than a year ago, and already president Bill Conley is talking about the need to expand this year.

When I finally decided to get my phone replaced, I went online with my carrier, Cingular Wireless, and reported my problem.

After I had agreed to pay the $210 if it turned out to be my fault, I clicked a few buttons on the computer screen and ordered a replacement.

That order quickly turned up at a 200,000-square-foot ATCLE building that ships out orders for new phones to individuals, retail stores and other warehouses.

"We handle about 50,000 orders a day, and up to several hundred thousand phones are actually shipped out of here on a given day," Mr. Conley said.

I ordered my replacement on a Thursday night. The next Monday, my new phone arrived, minus battery and battery compartment cover. I moved 71 photos and a dozen ringtones off the old phone onto a computer. Then I transferred my SIM card, my battery and cover to the new phone.

Through the maze

Normally, I next would put my old phone in the same box in which my replacement had arrived and mail it to the ATLCE plant.

Nathan Hunsinger / DMN Thi Nguyen sorts through incoming phones at ATC Logistics & Electronics.

However, I had arranged with ATCLE officials to let me follow my RAZR through the maze, with the understanding that my phone wouldn't get special treatment. If my phone was rejected as broken by the owner, so be it.

The phone inspections are done in a bigger facility, with 350,000 square feet. Technicians there check for obvious problems in the phones and then route them to different areas, depending on what's wrong with the phone.

Instead of taking my box off a conveyor belt, the technician was handed the phone. She scanned the mailing labels inside the box, scanned the bar codes in the battery compartment and took a look at a dot that normally is hidden behind the battery.

That dot, about the diameter of a pencil eraser, is very important.

"This little dot here?" Mr. Dickson said, pointing. "If you had water damage, it would be red. It pretty much takes a submerging. But if it's red, it voids the warranty."

White dot, good. My RAZR's dot was white. Nearby at the workstation was a RAZR just like mine — except for the red dot. That's the end of the line for that phone and about 3.5 percent of the returned phones that pass through ATCLE.

"The first thing we do is we try to clarify customer damage vs. normal damage," Mr. Conley said. "If it's dripping water, it's going to be your fault."

Finally, the technician finished her work and noted "no damage" on my worksheet. And that was it — no $210 bill.

Off to Mexico

My old phone eventually wound up in a bin of identical RAZRs to be shipped to a Motorola plant in Mexico for further forensics and repairs. Motorola's technicians may find, hypothetically, some bat guano inside my phone. But once the ATCLE employee said "no damage," it meant "no liability" for me.

That's typically the decision for phones in warranty with no visible damage. Phones in which the owner is blamed for the damage (think red dots, big dents, cracked screens and separate piles of phone pieces) are returned to the owner, with a note that he or she can expect a charge on their bill.

"We'll send it back to you," Mr. Dickson said, 'and say, 'Terry, by the way, the red dot indicates that this was exposed to water, which voids the warranty.' "

The last stop for my phone was a quadrant of the plant where ATCLE inspects, cleans up and repackages new phones that have been returned. Normally, my phone wouldn't have gone to that section of the building.

But so that I could see the process, ATCLE people hand-carried my old RAZR over to a diagnostic station in which a technician checked out its functions, software and such. It passed except for one flaw — the keyboard didn't light up.

I knew that.