Deal With Broken Phones the 'Green' Way

The corded telephone in my home office began misbehaving around the middle of June. The experience I had calling its maker Thomson S.A. (TMS Quote) about having it repaired has been a lesson in disposability.

It showed me how hard it is to be an eco-conscious (or simply thrifty) consumer who buys less, keeps stuff longer and doesn't consume for the sake of it.

I was in the kitchen, some 30 feet from the office, when the phone began emitting static-filled staccato sounds. After a few days of lifting and dropping the receiver, turning the speaker-phone on and off, unplugging and replugging it, and letting my husband go through the same motions, I decided to call the company for help fixing what seemed to be a short in the speaker.

The phone carries a General Electric (GE Quote) logo, but it's made by a division of Thomson, a French company.

My best guess is that I bought it in 2003, which would be light years ago for many electronic devices, but not telephones. From my point of view, this phone isn't meaningfully different in features or capabilities from those that Thomson is selling today.

I wanted the customer service people to tell me what they thought the problem might be, if I could fix it myself or if they had an authorized repairperson who could.

Alas, the help desk rep wasn't a true techie who understood phones. Clearly following a script, she wound her way through advice for a bad phone line (I reminded her that the noise happened when the phone wasn't in use), and for static on a cordless phone (I reminded her that it had a cord). She suggested unplugging it for 10 minutes (I told her I'd tried that). Out of options, she asked how old the phone was. I told her. She told me that since the phone is out of warranty, it would be more cost-effective to buy a new one than to fix it.

The problem didn't seem dire enough to justify tossing out an entire phone, so I asked what to do if I wanted it repaired. She told me that the company had no authorized repair people, and suggested I seek out "a local service center in your vicinity." I asked her if that meant a telephone repair guy, and she said yes.

I can get a GE phone and cordless handset package similar to the one I have for $52 from Circuit City (CC Quote), and I'd get the tax write-off.

But the exchange with the Thomson rep bugged me. The upshot was that if the phone was more than a year old -- the length of Thomson's warranty -- that I should just chuck it aside and buy another one. How good can the phone be, if that's the case?

Through a spokesperson, the company clarified its policy. It used to allow customers to return broken phones regardless of age. They would send out a reconditioned replacement and keep the other phone to fix and send to someone else. But "Repair and reconditioned costs escalated, and it became more expensive to repair the phone than to actually replace it with a new one," she said in an email. They seem to be saying that it became too expensive for the company to repair the phones for free. That doesn't necessarily mean it's cheaper for me to buy a new one than to have the old one fixed.