‘Dell’ rhymes with ‘fail’ when I say it

I know better than to ever try to purchase or own a Dell again. I have known better for YEARS. And yet … I was seduced by high-end specs on special.

Okay. The story. Because everyone cares.

My parents bought a Dell desktop eleven or so years ago. It was a fairly snazzy machine back in the day, but its innards would be laughable to the average 15-year-old in 2011. I don’t remember how large the hard drive is but I do know the RAM chugged along at 256mb. (Funny story: My dad maintains to this day that that machine “would run circles” around my mom’s newish laptop and my 2004 pre-Intel iMac “if it didn’t have all that shit on it.” “That shit” meaning, of course, Weatherbug and my mom’s dozen PopCap find-the-items games. Heh.)

Anyway, a decade’s worth of crap got loaded onto that computer, including large photographs from Dad’s DSLR. So, as you might imagine, its performance really took a nosedive and got to the point where sometimes you would wait minutes between mouse click and action. But we are a thrifty people when it comes to buying useful things as opposed to, say, giant paintings of Civil War notables. So it took until 2011 for my mom to decide that enough was enough, and we would be getting Dad a new computer for his birthday. She asked for my recommendation, so I started nosing around and trying to find deals. I decided not to have one custom built since I wasn’t sure that my Dad would perceive that as a better value and not just a computer cobbled together from spare parts. I got drawn in by a deal Dell was having for a few days, where I could get 1TB of storage with an Intel Core i5-650 and 6GB of RAM, plus a bunch of other good stuff (23-inch monitor, Photoshop Elements, etc.), all of which totaled less than $900. That came in under the budget I was given, and was a better deal than I was able to create at some other company sites, so I figured it was pretty good, and would give my dad a souped-up machine he could not complain about for a few years at least. (This is the part of the post where I hesitate to give these specs to the internet, because someone far more knowledgeable about this shit than I am is going to assume I am an idiot, despite the baseline thesis of this blog being “I AM AN IDIOT.” So, carry on.)

So I sat down with Dad when I went home to visit the family for his and Mom’s and my youngest nephew’s joint birthday celebration. We paged through all the options and I made sure that my recommendations worked for him. Then I bought the damn thing via the Dell website so I could make sure it had the specs I wanted, WITH NO GODDAMNED UPSELL. Easy, right?

The next day at work I got the obligatory phone call from my credit card, verifying a suspicious purchase (I suppose they consider anything not from Buster’s to be suspicious). I verified with a smile then went about my business for two weeks, as I had remembered that the ship date wasn’t until the 23rd or so, and because I had chosen free shipping, it wasn’t scheduled to arrive until the 29th.

I was running errands Monday when my dad called to say he’d not seen a computer yet. It dawned on me that the only e-mail I had received from Dell was an order confirmation. No “Your order has shipped!” update. So I came home and found my original confirmation e-mail and followed a “track my order” link, which led me to a page saying my order had been changed or canceled. Bokay. So I made a phone call to India to be told that my order was canceled and they didn’t know why. I was asked to call another number in India to try and find out why. That nice young man told me, simply, “fraud.” I tried to explain that I had verified the purchase with my credit card company and that I had a confirmation number from Dell, and no one had ever told me about the order being canceled. He transferred me to customer service, whose robotic menu shit the bed and spat out an error and hung up on me. I called one of the previous numbers and got a third person to try and explain my issue to. A lot of nice “sorry about your luck, ma’am” and “our system will not let me see why your order was canceled” but not a lot of “let me fix this for you.” I finally got transferred to a gal named Courtney in Nashville, who was just so super nice and seemingly sympathetic. I explained to her that I wanted the same specs for the same price I had agreed to before (a true hardass would have lobbied for a discount), and when I e-mailed her a list of the specs, she put me on hold and came back and told me she’s sorry but there’s just no way she can do that for me, and, after trying to sell me on some insane Dell membership something or other that I WOULD NEVER USE BECAUSE I FUCKING HATE THE COMPANY, proceeded to try and downgrade all the specs to get under the price point. I explained that that did not work for me.

She explained that the computer system was acting weird and not letting her access the information she needed to potentially work with me, so could she call me back tomorrow at 10 a.m.? Oh, SURE! I said, and gave her my phone number. I even asked for her e-mail address so I could e-mail her the spec list to make sure she didn’t miss anything. Of course, she did not call. Because “the computer system is acting weird” is code for “your $915 means nothing to this company, you worthless peon.” So obviously my dad still has no birthday present and I can’t stop fantasizing about burning Dell Inc. down Milton style, because what the fuck?

I realize I should call back and demand to speak to a manager, but I wasted an hour Monday just trying to get someone to acknowledge that what they had done needed rectifying (no one ever did). I will not be giving any money to Dell, ever. In some ways, I thank the Universe for reminding me of what I already knew: That Dell is a soulless shell of a company and that no one in my family will ever own another one of their products, if I have anything to do with it.