I received authorization to order a new, totally sweet laptop last Monday. As of today, I still don’t posses it. It sits, as it has for the last three days, in a UPS warehouse in North Haven. How it arrived there is a rather boring if incredibly frustrating story. It does however illustrate just how the practice of rhyming their name with hell really is.

1. Our sales rep, quit. To become a priest. Seriously. No one told us. Not surprisingly at this time, he stopped responding to emails and phone calls, however his voice mailbox and e-mail account remained active. Thus 3 days passed before we got angry enough at them to call someone else.

2. The person we eventually called became our new rep. He is both new to us, and apparently his job as well. It took him another 2 days to get a quote to us. He refused to sell us stuff at the home user price advertised on the website and instead said we must pay a considerably inflated “corporate” price, for different machines altogether. Because we apparently cannot buy home user machines, since we’re a company, even if it’s what we want. His manager didn’t seem to agree though, and after several hours on the phone and several days wasted, the laptops were supposedly on the way.

-The weekend goes by-

3. Monday morning the shipping announcement arrived in our email. The new rep decided a good idea would be to look through our account history, and pick out an address we used for 1 PC roughly 8 months ago…and ship our laptops to that address, rather than the main delivery address on the account. The fact that the most recent 48 machines were sent to our current correct address didn’t seem to both him. Clearly we wanted these laptops shipped to a ghetto in Middletown.

4. A talk to our rep’s supervisor’s supervisor resolved this…or so we thought. We were told the next day (now Tuesday of this week) that our laptops were back at the distribution center and that we should have them the next day.

5. We didn’t get them Wednesday. Instead, we checked the tracking and learned that they were waiting at the North Haven distribution center for customer pickup, at the request of the customer. We called the vendor again. We were told that we should ignore this odd tracking status and that they would be delivered on Thursday at the absolute latest.

6. They weren’t here today, they were still sitting in North Haven, with the same tracking status. Everyone at the vendor swears up and down that they will be arriving tomorrow “by the end of the business day”. So we’ll see. But I HATE them…oh so very, very much.

The vendor has taken the minimally thoughtful action of discounting the cost of shipping, and giving us a $40 dollar credit because they are oh so concerned with our happiness. I’d be happier if I had my laptop, but I guess I can survive. But holy hell has this company gone to shit. They are just getting too big to handle their business. They used to have good phone support, and would actually be capable of getting their shit together enough to deliver two fairly stock model laptops within two weeks when you pay for expedited shipping, now instead you just receive a comedy of errors.

We did however, place another order for even more equipment from them today…because they just have better deals and good equipment for the price. But damn do I wish there was a serious alternative.

“Dude, yer going to hell!”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.