Is that a shrub in your pocket...
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Dell Support Hell
OK, I should have known better than to buy from a red company, let alone one based in Texas. Buy, well, they had the best price I could find on the type of laptop I wanted (that is, as small as possible but still having an optical drive). And, I must admit, the one I got worked quite well, was nice and small, and allowed me to connect to the Internet from home, school, and even from the Omni Shoreham in DC when I was sequestered there. Then came "the incident."
I'm not exactly sure what happened. I think it was cat related, but I can't prove it. At any rate, I was rudely awakened one Sunday morning by a loud, constant beeping, which turned out to be coming from my laptop. To make a long story short, it was dead. After spending some time on the phone with tech support in Bangalore, the issued a return box, and I shipped the computer back to "the depot," as they seem to call it.
Well, they determined that it wasn't covered under the warranty because there was spillage (this is where I suspect a cat was involved), and so I authorized the charge to repair it. So far, so good.
Unforunately, it's been nothing short of an annoying pain in the ass since then. If I try to track the goddamn thing online, it tells me it shipped, with an estimated delivery of 1/23. Yet the "status" remains "in transit to carrier." I e-mailed support, and then told me "oh, you bought a warranty on a motherboard, so there's no physical shipment." Bullshit, I told them, I shipped you my fucking computer; there'd better be a physical shipment. "Oh, in that case, you'll have to call somebody else."
OK, so I called somebody else. Maneuvered through the voicemail - picked the wrong option once or twice, and got "thank you, goodbye" click, and had to start over again. I finally got a very nice human, who managed to look things up in the "out of warranty repair" database, and although she couldn't see much, she could see that it hadn't been fixed yet, even though it says it shipped online.
So, I waited for a few days, and once again did all the voicemeil shit, and finally got to a human, who looked things up, said it wasn't fixed, and then gave me this mysterious "dispatch number" that so many voicemail (or help desk or whatever the fuck you call it) systems had asked about before, and a number to track it.
So, I waited a few more days, and then tried to to track it. The voice system foiled me, and I just wasn't in the mood, so I gave up. Wated a few more days, and stuck with it this time. Found the voice prompt to enter my dispatch number. "Please hold while we look up your information." OK, now we're getting someplace. "Please hold while transfer you to a customer service representative." Even better. Then...the goddamn voicemail system I'd been trying to navigate before. Waded through a bunch of prompts, picked the wrong option, got the "thanks, seeya," click, and started at the beginning again. I went through all the same shit, got to the same place, chose the other option, "you'll hear two tones while we transfer your call," and, FUCK! Back to the first guy with the dispatch number, and then back through all the same shit. It was just one big loop. I did the loop a couple more times, just becuae, and then finally hung up.
So, I've given up for the moment. I e-mailed support - again - but this time, I haven't even gotten an autoresponse e-mail from them, so I don't know what to do. I'm close to voiding the credit card transaction and telling 'em to just ship the goddamn thing back, unrepaired. If I could get parts, I could fix the friggin' thing myself (I prefer to put together my own computers anyway, though that's tough to do with a laptop), but god only knows how tough it would be to get the parts I need from these people, and it's cheaper to fix it than to buy a new one at this point, but, man, I will never - never, never, never - buy anything from Dell ever again. Ever.
Gateway is a blue company. My advice? Stick with them.
