Freedom Furniture's Laptop Table II Mobile

Freedom Furniture's Laptop Table II Mobile

June 15, 2006

I recently bought a product from Freedom Furniture sold as a "Laptop Table II Mobile", brought it home, read the instruction booklet looking for warnings, assembled it and placed my one week old Acer Ferrari laptop on it. Sitting down at it, I went to adjust the table to a comfortable position, and the table's tray flipped with a bang and literally threw the laptop onto the floor, completely smashing the LCD screen. The shop I bought it from, Freedom Furniture, initially told me that it was my fault for not watching an in-store product demonstration (that was never offered to me), and later told me that I had been "adequately warned" because there was a sticker on the underside of the table advising to remove objects before adjusting. The adjustments on the laptop table are basically the same as on any office chair. There is one for the height, and one for the angle. Using Freedom's reasoning, they would find people adequately warned if office chairs flipped people backwards onto their heads, provided the chairs had a sticker underneath them. From my perspective, office chairs should safely support office staff, and laptop tables should safely support laptop computers. A scenario that nearly happened with my 3 year old niece but luckily didn't, would be a small child pressing the button and having a 4kg laptop dropped on their head. The product has an obvious design flaw in that it will throw a laptop 100% of the time when the adjustment button is pressed. I have photos, a video demonstration (using a stunt laptop) and all correspondence with Freedom available at http://arg.zero.googlepages.com/freedomlaptoptable

Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with something like this? I've filed a complaint with Consumer Affairs and a local television program (in Melbourne, Australia), but neither have been able to respond yet.