My Unfocused Life

I bought my mother in law a Dell. It was so easy. A couple of points here and a couple of clicks there, and my money was gone. No Dell yet though. That was a couple of weeks ago.

Monday I received a note that the Dell shipped, complete with FedEx tracking number. Funny thing though, the tracking number contained a link that takes me to an empty page. No Dell on a truck, traveling at high speed to my house. Just an empty lonely page. I fired off a note to Dell order support, but got a canned email response with an answer that was never in the same universe as my question.

I called Dell customer support and got Shiva Rabasumashrikalika in India who read me a script for her computer that said “the tracking number would be updated 3 days after the order shipped”. I explained that it was already 3 days after the order shipped and two days after the promised delivery date. She looked up the answer to this question and read, “I will forward your concern to the appropriate representatives. Please keep checking the site for further status.” I hung up and composed an email to Paul Bell, VP of North American Operations and Michael Cannon, VP of Global Operations. The letter read as follows:

Mr Bell,

I am writing out of total frustration over dealing with you organization. Please understand that my past 8 or 9 computers have been Dells. In the past, I found you to be a reputable supplier with whom I enjoyed conducting business.

This is true no more. My recent few transactions have been painful. I went from being excited by “dude your getting a Dell” to “I’d rather stick pins in my eyeballs rather than dealing with Dell”.

I recently ordered a Dell system for my mother in law. This was to be an easy purchase. I counted on using the web to follow my order from inception to delivery. Unfortunately, things have not gone smoothly.

On March 2nd I received an email that said my order was shipped. The attached tracking number link to fedex yielded no information. According to fedex, although the product “shipped” from Dell is was not received by fedex. I don’t understand this. Either it shipped or it did not. Either fedex has it or it hasn’t shipped.

Trying to Dell with you customer support organization is a waste of time. It bad enough that you send our jobs over to fucking India, but it is an insult to deal with incompetent worthless piece of ship representatives who have no value except to further frustrate your customers. They neither understand American English, nor speak it well. There is no commonality between Americans and people who live in a backward country where they have no value on human life. What the fuck are you trying to do here?

Needless to say, I am very sorry I purchased my computer from Dell. If there were a way to cancel this order and get by my money, I would buy my mother in law a MacBook. I bought a MacBook for my wife at Christmas time, and it was as enjoyable as dealing with Dell is painful.

How can you sleep at night.

Regards,

Gregg
Brookline Ma

I followed up that letter with another email to Michael Dell:

Micheal,

I have been a Dell fan since the early 90s and almost all of my PC since 1995 have been Dells. In my past positions as IT director, I bought exclusively Dell equipment.

What the fuck has happened to you guys. When did you become a caricature of how not to run a consumer business. Your website provides worthless updates, your customer support is non existant, unless you enjoy having someone read to you from a script in incomprehensible English.

It’s bad enough you are shipping our jobs to India, but it is totally insulting to have the replacements be so incompetent and worthless.

From this point on, I am only buying Macs. If I need PC compatibility I will run a virtual machine.

Gregg

No more Dells for me. From now on I only buy MacBooks.