Award Winning Fundage Grifting
A coworker has a laptop. It is a Dell. For it, she has a docking station. When the laptop is docked in the station, the desktop icons disappear for one user, but not for another. When undocked, all is well.
This, then, is clearly a minor config problem. Maybe a driver issue, but that it works for one user and not another screams config.
Sal in Jakarta, representing Dell’s award winning technical support, feels differently. “Oh, very bad. Your computer is in very bad shape. Too bad you didn’t take the extended warranty. I can help you, but it’ll cost you $239.”
When my coworker balked at this, Sal went on, “I’ll give you a minute to think it over. Talk to your husband. But your computer could crash and die any minute.”
What bullshit. This is the sort of crass money-at-all-costs behavior that gives companies, and entire industries, bad reputations. Michael Dell, for fucking shame.
Maybe this is Dell’s consumer support division. We have service contracts (warranty / extended warranty) for our machines at work (and we’re pretty much a Dell shop). They’ve always been great — easy to understand, helpful, and they’re usually even willing to let us do the part swaps (of course, on many Dell laptops, a trained chimpanzee could swap out the HD.)
That is hilarious! This is a true story? ‘Talk with your husband, but be quick! it could die any minute!’ ROTFL I’m thinking of becoming a comedian ‘cuz more and more companies just keep making it easier and easier.