Dude, don't buy a Dell...

Well. My Dell saga continues... I received an e-mail from them letting me know that my case was resolved and that I would receive a survay. Yes, nice that it ws resolved, now how about telling me how it was resolved? Am I going to be required to pay for some random charge that wound up on my account or not?

So, I went to the website they had listed, and ws asked for my e-mail address and password. Huh? So I went to retreive password and entered my e-mail address (the one where I had just been sent an e-mail). Address not found.

I swear I will make it my life's misson to make sure that no one I know buys a Dell computer. ("Hello. My name is Inigeo Montoya, you killed my father...") But seriously, I am frustrated.

First my hard drive starts to crap out on me. I called Dell. Some dude told me to run a diagnostic, which turned up bad sectors in my hard drive. He then told me to ignore them. As a result, when my hard drive finally crashed, I lost about, oh, I don't know, 40 gigs of data. So I had to get a replacement hard drive (the laptop is not even a year old at this point). I pointed out to Dell that it was responsible for retreiving any data it could from my dead drive because it was Dell's fault that I did not back up the data in anticipation of the demise of my computer storage (I did save some of to disks, but I lost a lot.) It was Dell's negligence is not mentioning to me that bad sectors spread which caused me to lose all that I did. But no, Dell dropped the ball. It did send me a new hard drive (which I have a feeling has already started to crap out) and made me send the old drive back. I asked to keep the drive longer (so I could hunt down some computer nerd to bail me out) but the oh-so-friendly company refused.

Keep in mind that during all this, I was receiving at least two calls a day from Dell asking me to fill out their survay (and telling me to rate its customer service highly).

Next month I receive a bill from Dell. The comp' is all paid off, so I figure they've bunged it up and charged me for the replacement hard drive. So I call. Turns out the change ($139 and some change) is from a third party company and is some save-twenty-percent-when-you-go-to-the-movies deal. I asked how it wound up on my card. They had no clue. So I told them to remove it. The dolt on the line told me it would be taken care of in 48 to 36 hours. So I called four days later to close the account. The new dolt on the other end informed me that I could not close the account because there was a charge on it. Hmm. A 139 dollar (and some change) charge. And no, there was no history of my having called to have the charge removed. But it would have to be submitted to a manager. Meanwhile, I wanted to know, could I close my account so that no more random charges would appear? No. (Of course not). But the manager should make a decision in two weeks. By the way, could I fill out a survey, remembering that the service representitives's ability to feed his sixteen children was dependent upon my giving him an outstanding rating?

Two weeks later I call again. At least this time there is a record of my case. But it will take about two months for it to be cleared up (during which time the charge earns penelties and interest--which I don't have to pay if the case is decided in my favor). At this point I'm having flashbacks to the Army and thinking about Kafka. And yes, I'm still receiving several phone calls (and e-mails) asking me to fill out that damned survey. (Maybe I will send this in lieu of the survey. Yes, I think I will. By the way, I wonder how many calories angry typing burns).

And now this. My mother informs me that if I ever buy another Dell she will disown me. Well, it's not something that either of us have to worry about. Well, we'll see what happens.