telescope woes

The acquisition of my new telescope is proving more difficult by the day. I originally bought said telescope this past Saturday, July 22. Smooth transaction, liked the salesman at the camera shop, all was well. I got the telescope home and finally found time Monday night to pop it out of the box and go to work. It did not go well. The telescope I bought, a Meade ETX-125AT, has superb Maksutov-Cassegrain optics that rival more expensive telescopes with larger apertures. However, the unfortunate tradeoff with this scope is the inferior construction of the gearbox that provides sky tracking-it is contructed of several gears made of hardened plastic rather than metal. This is the only way to have great optics and sky tracking in an affordable package. Very well, I'm willing to accept delicate mechanics for great optics. Well, upon powering up my telescope and attempting to align it I quickly discovered that my gearbox was suffering from a "drive motor fault". This problem seems to be the most common and dreaded problem discussed on Meade telescope sites. So, I was dead in the water, and from my research I knew there was no troubleshoot, this scope was DOA. I repacked it and proceeded to call my guy at the local camera shop on Wednesday. When I told him about the drive motor fault over the phone, I got an "uh-oh" in response. He immediately told me to repack the scope and bring it in for an exchange. I will do so tomorrow. I'll give this particular telescope one more try. I did manage to look at Jupiter through the broken one and it was spectacular. If the second scope fails me, I'll seek another model or cash out of the endeavor altogether with a refund. Stay tuned.