Tentative good news on the computer front, I’m happy to say. Dell has supposedly shipped a refurbished replacement system that will supposedly arrive tomorrow and will supposedly be functional. They will supposedly also be shipping the disc for Microsoft Office separately, so someday I will again be able to word process on a keyboard larger than three square inches.
Lest I disappoint, however, my interactions with Dell have gotten no less ridiculous since my last post. Now that there’s some reasonable prospect of my getting some kind of functional system back prior to retirement, the total confusion at Dell customer service has passed beyond frustrating to fascinating. Despite the fact that I wrote a letter to Dell’s president for consumer products and the customer service folks are clearly taking me seriously, they cannot get their s*** together to save their lives. It is like watching the fall of the Roman Empire. I really think this is how it happened. One side of the empire doesn’t know what the other side is doing, communication lines fall, a few key shipments are lost, and the next thing you know, the barbarians are sweeping down from the north waving bankruptcy papers.
I’m now dealing only with the escalation department. That’s nice, since they speak better English and seem to have slightly more ability to take actual action than the regular customer service people. Even they, however, cannot get themselves straight. I have been receiving multiple daily phone calls from different people, who, as always, have conflicting stories to tell me every time they call. Your computer will ship Friday! Your computer will ship tomorrow! You will be able to access your old hard drive! You will not be able to access your old hard drive! How do they not know when they call that someone in their department called ten minutes earlier with a different story? Being as they are a computer company, surely they have a computer system recording this stuff. (The opinion of a friend of the family at IBM? Dell’s lost my system and doesn’t want to admit it. Did I mention I’m glad I didn’t send my hard drive?)
The latest? A replacement system will be shipped to me. And Escalation Guy #1 will have my old system shipped back to me SO THAT I CAN SHIP IT BACK TO DELL. Seriously? Dear God, people, what kind of ship are you running? I have to admit that despite earlier posts I had been sort of hoping Dell would wow me (with say, a new system) in such a way that I could go back to being a Dell customer in good conscience. But this? This is the path to bankruptcy, folks. Don’t count on buying a new Dell and being able to rely on your warranty, because if they keep running things like this, they won’t be around long enough to back it up for you.
