As part of resuscitating the ‘dude, we’ve been trying to update our website drunkdude69.com. Unfortunately the hosting company, who shall remain nameless *COUGH* *ipowerweb* *COUGH!* has demonstrated abysmal service, and their products are of tremendously poor quality.

I’m not going to get into the specifics right now (that would take a while). The reason that I brought it up is that I had an experience a couple days ago that was such a stark contrast to what seems to be the norm in customer service (which is to say, crappy).

One of the Sperzel locking tuners on my guitar stopped working correctly. These tuners have a knob on the bottom that is designed to raise or lower a pin in the center of the tuner. The pin is what locks the string in place after you thread it through the tuner. On the tuner in question, the pin stopped retracting when I’d unscrew the knob, so I couldn’t get a string threaded through.

I found out that Sperzel is here in Cleveland only a few miles from my place. I called up and asked if I could get a new tuner directly from them, and they said to come in and bring the existing tuner so they could match it. I stopped by there the other day.

They’re headquartered in a nondescript green building in an industrial park near the highway. If I hadn’t had the address, I never would have found it – there was no sign. When I went inside I was greeted by Roger, who asked how he could help. I reminded him of our phone conversation and showed him the tuner.

He looked at it and said, “I can fix this. Wait here for a minute.” He ducked into the back (where I assume there’s the machine shop that cranks out the tuners) and was back in a flash. The tuner was fixed. He had replaced the knob and cleaned out and lubed the inner shaft where the pin rides. He described how he did it, and didn’t want any payment for fixing it.

I shook his hand and thanked him profusely, excited to finally get my guitar back in working order. As I left, I couldn’t help comparing that level of service to the generally lackluster interactions I have with other businesses. It was great to find some folks that actually care about serving a customer, and I highly recommend their products even more now than I would have in the past. Go get some Sperzels.