TUESDAY
1. Due to a dire personal crisis, I had almost no sleep for two nights. I gave up on sleep Tuesday morning, made a large cup of really delicious coffee, and knocked it all over my computer.
2. I looked up Dell on Get a Human and phoned.
3. In the past, getting a human at Dell has taken HOURS -- hours and hours filled with oceans of hurt. I'd have to book a day off to get help from Dell.
But this time a human immediately confirmed that I had a warranty until 2018 and connected me quickly to another human. She first said, "Pack up your computer and mail it to us."
I said, "SEND ME A GUY."
She tried to do several diagnostics, I pressed F2, F12, start, restart, and I said: SEND ME A GUY.
She said, "I can't send you a guy until I know what parts to send him. If you mail it to us then we'll have all the parts available."
I said, "SEND ME A GUY."
She said, "He might have the wrong parts. He might have to make several trips."
I said, "SEND ME A GUY."
She said she'd order some parts and send me a guy, and then sent me this personal email: "I enjoyed working with you today on your coffee spill issue. I have included your service request and dispatch information below. Please be sure to contact me immediately if you do not hear from the onsite technician by noon tomorrow morning."
WOW.
WEDNESDAY
I hadn't heard from the guy so I sent a personal email to her at 9:46 a.m.
Within an hour, she wrote back saying, "I just checked the status, it looks like the technician does not have the part yet. He will reach out once he picks up the part. I’ll keep you posted."
The guy phoned and said the parts were in and he was on his way over.
The guy arrived and looked at my computer and said, "OY GEVALT!!" -- this is a Yiddish expression, that I wasn't expecting to hear from a techy. The guy was amazing. They had sent him what seems to be the Standard COFFEE-WINE Repair Kit. It had a new motherboard, a new keyboard, a new USB port, and other goodies. By 4:00 p.m. -- 30 hours later -- my computer was up and running. I wrote my personal DELL rep and she wrote back saying this:
"I’m glad to hear you were pleased with the service!! You can always reach out to me with any other issues. It was a pleasure assisting you!"
The guy gave me his cell # and told me to contact him anytime. He said, "You have the complete care warranty. You can throw the computer off the roof of your house and we'll fix it."
It's a brave, new world of computer repair.
HUBSKI: What do you think? How many times have you spilled liquids on your computer?
It takes a special breed to not need instagram for soft focus filters. This is why mk is our leader.
I have precisely one fatal spill to my name. My weapon of choice was Mountain Dew, and my victim was an ASUS Zenbook. Though, all things considered, I have to consider it an act of mercy. That thing was cursed. The saga begins a few years ago. I had saved up enough for a new laptop to replace the Dell I've had since 2008. I wanted an ultrabook; something I could slip into a bag and not have it cut off circulation at my shoulder. The pickings were slim as I was not living in the US and Amazon wasn't an option. I wanted an 11 inch i5 version of the Zenbook, but I couldn't find one. Well, I did, online. But what was delivered was an i3 and hastily returned. Weeks later, I was casually browsing a local tech store, and a sales rep approached. No, I wasn't seeing what I wanted; I wanted a Zenbook. The rep's face lit up. They had one solitary Zenbook out the back that had been returned. It sounded too good to be true, but I was intrigued. I was so close to a legendary beast that until now had evaded me. The Zenbook they brought out was still sealed in shrinkwrap, but it wasn't 11 inch, it was a 13 inch model. I was disappointed, but then I realized it was a model that one could upgrade the RAM on. That and the discount for it being a return made it worthwhile. Sold! I bounced home with my new shiny toy, an SSD with which to replace the spinny disk, and an 8gb stick of RAM to take the machine to its capacity. I gleefully peeled the plastic off the box and delved in to upgrade my precious. I unscrewed the bottom panel and peeled it off. It was so thin and not solid like the chassis I'd felt on the 11 inch model. And uh oh, what's this? The warranty sticker on the removable RAM module has been broken by a screwdriver... Fuck! There was nothing I could do now. It's my word against theirs, and after all, this is literally the only Zenbook I can find. I decide to grin and bear it. That night, I notice the backlight peeking through a hairline crack in one of the keys, and sure enough the key is soon split fully. I promptly find a replacement key online for cheap. When it arrives a few weeks later, I carefully open the package and pull out... a (slightly less) split key. Less than a year later, I pack everything up and move to the US. With all the rough and tumble of moving, something went gone wonky with the screen and it often didn't turn on. Adding to that, some of the number keys have stopped working reliably. I vowed to run it in to the ground completely before replacing it, and so I attached a monitor and installed WoW on it. It coped, barely; I think I could have fried an egg on it. Despite all this, I swear I didn't 'Dew it on purpose. But sometimes I wonder if I didn't subconsciously put it out of its misery.
Oh gosh, I feel like this is one of those posts you shouldn't read if it's never happened to you before. Why? Because now it's sort of BOUND to happen to you. There are two things that seem common to people that haven't happened to me. 1. I've never had anything spill on my laptop 2. I've never dropped my phone and broken/cracked it or dropped it in the toilet. It seems like a lot of people drop phones in the toilet. As for the customer service you experienced, well... thats just awesome!! I'm glad to read that and my hats off to you for posting this. Too often people post about their BAD customer service experiences and never about the good ones. hobn a groys nakht !
For some of us it's less that we drop it in the toilet and more that we are oppressed with inadequate pockets-- our pants are designed to cling to our bodies rather than function as pants-- so we have to put our phones in our back pockets and they don't really stay there when we have to slide out pants down to pee. I've also cracked an iPod when I fell on my ass. This could have also been solved by real front pockets. Ahem. Excuse the rantpage.
We talked about women's pants and pockets last night in irc. They seem very non-functioning these days. To the point of using their back pockets to hold their phones. Odd
It's for fashion. You get a cleaner line if you use fake pockets and using the pocket over time messes with the form of the garment. Not very practical at all.
Why have pockets at all then? I bet pockets are a thing of the past in 10 years for men and women. So much of what we normally put in them will be digitized and worn.
It's hard getting any service rep to go OFF SCRIPT. I discovered if I say over and over again, "Send me a guy" one actually shows up. Now if a DELL service rep became GOD, and I said SEND ME A GUY over and over.... let's just say it could get interesting.
Will you please start posting more to your blog? You are very talented, this post could TOTALLY have been on lil's book of questions. There's a question in there. What would that be?
That's great! I'm looking forward to trying to answer some questions!
Years ago I killed my old iBook with wine. My daughter killed my husband's MacBook Air with herbal tea. I've had several water spills. I also kill keyboards. Once when I was very tired, very very tired, I pushed the laptop away to the left side of the bed, but it turned out I was already on the left side of the bed and had just shoved it over the edge. Shattered the screen. I love great customer service.
I got some help to destroy a MacBook Pro. I was sipping on a glass of club soda, and made the mistake of leaving it within a meter of the laptop while the kid was running around the house chasing a balloon. The laws of physics require club soda to be splashed across the keyboard in such circumstances. The video card got fried, but everything else was intact. I considered it a good excuse to buy a nice monitor and bluetooth keyboard, and now the laptop serves as a monitor stand.
Too many, sadly. I should really start getting those extended warranties things, 2 years just doesn't cut it for me. Also, I usually have the worst luck with warranties: my current laptop's keyboard start malfunctioning 3 days after the warranty ended :( It's pretty cool that you got a person immediately, and that they sent a guy over (even if you had to nag them) the next day and even more so that he just fixed it on the spot and even gave you his number! I've never gotten that level of repair service awesomeness! Last time by computer broke down (the incident with the keyboard) I went almost two months without my laptop..
but you are on a continent far away, right? I have never before had this level of Dell service. If I had done what they said and mailed it off to them, it would probably take a week to get it back. I didn't even ask where to mail it to. SEND A GUY is my new mantra. the GetHuman website that I mention in my story is pretty cool.
Europe is kinda far, yeah. It wasn't supposed to take two months though, stuff happened and when it came back it had a ding on the lid so it had to go back so they could replace it.. Anyway, SEND A GUY seems like a good mantra! And I've never heard about that website but it sounds very cool!