Dell hell, continued
: As I sent my machine to Dell in the Airborne ambulance, I took the hard drive out at Dell’s demand (what if it’s the hard drive or the registry that’s broken? they will make me spend hours on the phone to diagnose that, said the man). I put it in my son’s Dell, which is exactly the same: an Inspiron 600m. Ah, but I saw that it was not exactly the same, not at all: When the machine started up, my laptop’s brain in my son’s laptop’s body started recognizing no end of new and strange hardware. And that’s to say that there is no consistency at all in the Dell product. Tom Friedman wrote about that, admiringly, in his World is Flat book: In their just-in-time gusto, they grab a part from this supplier or that supplier and slap them in there. And so there is no consistency to the product: The 600m I bought and was satisifed with two months ago is not one bit like the 600m I bought next. It’s as if I went to Burger King and they substituted pork for beef because it was cheaper today.
But you know what, that’s Dell’s problem, really: All I should care about is having a computer that works. How it works and how it’s made is their problem if I have a warranty, right?
But that’s what bothers me most: I bought that warranty, the top-of-the-line, most expensive warranty that warrants to send someone to my home to repair my machine.
Except that’s a big fat Dell lie. The person they would send to my home would not have the parts (or, according to some of my commenters, the expertise, training, and intelligence) to repair that machine.
Smells like fraud to me.
Smells like a class-action suit to some of my commenters and emailers.
Calling Mr. Spitzer. Calling Mr. Spitzer.
