I bought a PC to replace my aging desktop, a Dell that has given me faithful service over the last six years, but is now getting a bit limite limite as they say in French on the obsolescence front. (I am fine with that, six years is a bleeding epoch in hardware terms.)
what with it being a Dell, I thought I would do what I always did before, which is to call Dell, and get another one. It's always been seamless in the past, so it should be again, right?
Wrong, how utterly wrong. I do not know what has happened to Dell since I last ordered a machine, but my Gods are they ever in a mess.
I ordered a machine with reasonably high spec, expecting to last a few years, so I put down more than a couple of thousand dollars.
Dell then took three weeks to ship a machine, which is much longer than ever before.
When it arrived, it would not even try and boot, so broken was it.
Technical support was a sick joke, talking to a poor bloody script jockey in Bangalore on minimum wage, who knew less about PCs than I do. (I have been using them for 20 years now.) Conclusion, needs to be given back to Dell.
It takes them about three or four days to call to arrange the "next day" pickup.
Then it goes into the Dellhole and now I cannot even find out what the status on the call is. If I go to their website and type in the relevant details, it gives me a status on the relevant call number of "closed". If I try and enter the machine reference, it just tells me that the site is busy, and try later.
So, they have my money, and my machine, and I have nothing, but the feeling that I am trapped in a Kafka play written for outsourcers.
I can honestly say I have never spent so much money for such appalling service, in fact, tantamount to fraud in terms of what I paid for as advertised goods, and what I got in response.
I will never ever deal with the company again, in light of the total decay in capabilities that they seem to have experienced.
In contrast I was in town yesterday, and went into the Apple Store. Man, that was different. I think that Michael Dell might just have won Steve Jobs another customer.
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