Westinghouse service (?)

Last year we bought a Westinghouse LVM37w3. It's a great monitor, and it does a great job of displaying output from a Sony HD camcorder.

Well, it used to. Early this spring it started flaking out. After it had been on for awhile the backlight would suddenly go out, leaving us with audio and a pitch-black screen. To get the picture back we had to cycle the thing off and on again.

After reading a few anecdotes online, which claimed that others had cured this problem by resetting to factory defaults, we gave it a try. The change was noticeable. Now, as soon as the monitor was powered up, the backlight would go out.

Luckily the monitor was still, barely, under warranty. We called Westinghouse tech support (1-866 -287-5555), who said they would call us with an RMA number within a couple of days.

After a week, tired of waiting, I called them again. They had the RMA number and claimed they had left it on our answering machine. I wonder whose answering machine they really left it on, but no matter: we shipped off the unit at considerable expense (a couple hundred dollars).

It has been gone since May 3rd. Checking the status of the unit has been painful: call Westinghouse tech support, ask for a status update, hear the poor staffer on the other end explain that (s)he needs to submit a status request to the warehouse and to call back in two or three days.

For the past two weeks the answer has come back that the monitor has been repaired, but is still listed as "processing" by the warehouse. They will call me as soon as they have a UPS Ground tracking number. (They haven't called yet.) If I don't hear from them within a week, please call again for an update.

Something sure seems fishy here. Or at least incompetent.