Customer Service? Hardly.

This is an email I sent to a Help Desk supervisor at Dell:

Hello Antonio.

I'm a very dissatisfied Dell customer.

I have a PowerEdge 4600 that has an internal Autoloader 120T that's a hunk of crap.

So I call to get it "repaired" under my service contact.

On Friday.

But I ask to have the call placed for after business hours on Monday.

Which Bjorn does, after 80 minutes.

So now it's Monday.

I was in training on Monday. The parts arrived and were routed to my desk. I returned to the office about 4:45 p.m.

I opened the box. The parts were correct. This time. Last time I had an issue with a tape drive I was sent a single tape drive, not the autoloader that I currently have.

That was four hours wasted sitting around waiting for a second dispatch of parts.

So that's at least one positive thing from this experience.

And the only one.

Rick was waiting for me when I arrived. Rick was the "fine quality technician" dispatched by Dell to repair this issue.

I meet Rick at the door at 4:45. Rick was apparently sick.He looked sick.

I try to tell him that I can't shut down the production server until 5:15. and he's going to have to wait.

He then tells me he's sick. And that he can't hear because his ears are all clogged up.

Great. So he's contagious. Apparently viruses - not the computer kind - are just another Dell Service feature, eh?

So after I tell him again that I can't let him on the server until 5:15. So he give a scowl in return. Hmm, contagious and pissy. Did I win the lottery or what?

I specified on the phone with Bjorn on Friday that this repair had to be completed after regular business hours on Monday.

So I make him sit for a half-hour in the break room.

Where he falls asleep.

Which was reported to me by the users that I support. Nice reflection on me, and Dell, eh?

So at 5:15 I make sure all my users are logged out of the file server.

And wake Rick up.

And Rick replaces the drive.

And leaves when I tell him it's working.

Because it was working. In so much as it loaded the tapes, ran a cleaning cycle and said "Ready" on the LCD screen.

It showed up in BIOS. It accepted the tape magazine. I ran the cleaning program.

When the backup was scheduled to run, however, the drive failed.

When I came in this morning, there was an error on the LCD screen saying LDR_HW ERROR with some numbers. Now I'm not a Certified Dell Technician dealing with backup devices, but I'm guessing that LDR_HW ERROR means there's a problem with the loader hardware, right?

So I call back to Dell. And give Roy the numbers. And tell him that I'm in a bind. I'm leaving for vacation at 5 p.m. today. And my tape drive still isn't working.

So Roy takes 90 minutes of my life. The first 70 were spent trying to figure out what the problem was and trying to understand why I wouldn't allow someone I don't know, probably from a foreign country, poke around my server in a webex session trying to determine what the problem is.

I clearly have an error code. It states hardware error on the loader. Yet Roy can't find anything in the knowledge base.

Roy and I eventually come to an agreement that I can shut my file server down 45 minutes early so he can get the parts and another fine quality technician here to fix the server like they should have fixed the server Monday night.

Fine. So I've now spent a total of 90 minutes on the phone with Roy.

To fix a problem that should have been fixed a day before.

Then Betty calls me and tells me that the parts won't be here until 5:15 p.m. because they don't have the part in Columbus and they have to drive it down from Cleveland.

Well, in my world, 5:15 time of delivery - 12:32 time of dispatch = 4 hours and 43 minutes, which is outside of the four hour service specified in the SLA that my company has with Dell.

So now let's talk quality.

Dell, from what I understand, prides itself on service.

Might wanna rethink, or re-engineer that. I know you subcontract for field service. I've been to Dell. I've been Dell Certified. I spent a week at the Round Rock facility drinking the kool-aid and being indoctrinated into the corporate culture of all that is Dell.

And I respect Michael Dell for his business sense and vision to build machines that are stable and dependable for business and not worry about having bleeding edge technology.

Because business demand stability over performance.

And because of my training in 2002, I understand that becoming a Dell Service Provider usually means you're a pretty decent technician.

With some customer service skills.

There are, however, exceptions.

Rick, who serviced the tape drive on Monday, is one of those exceptions.

After I called Dell to place a new service call for the same issue, Rick, who did the poor quality job last night, then called me to ask about the new ticket.

I told him he did a terrible job. I told him I wanted a different technician to come install the part tonight.

He had no apology. He had nothing else to say except, "Well, okay." and hung up.

Tim called me from the same number as Rick, about 30 minutes later, and I explained the situation to him, I said "Rick was here last night" and he said "Oh no."

Now I've worked with some less-than-stellar people in my life. That's usually the response a quality technician, like myself, gives, involuntarily, when they realize they're going into a hostile environment to clean up a mess left by a moron they work with.

Now let's talk overall satisfaction:

As I see it, Rick is 0-2. No technical skills. No customer service skills.

And Dell, so far is 0-2 on this issue.

Wait, 0-3 if the parts don't get here with the 4 hour window.

I just spoke to the UPS driver. He says he should be here before 4:30. So there's hope on that end. Thank God for UPS.

But so far, as far as this tape drive is concerned, all-time, Dell is 0-4 as this is the 4th service call on this particular backup device.

Replaced four times in 18 months?

Pathetic.

And I don't have the time or energy to discuss the "quality" of service received on the telephone, so I'll sum it up with these three lines:

1st call - with Bjorn - 80 minutes of me attempting to understand what he was saying. Does anyone at Dell speak ungarbled English anymore?

2nd call - with Roy - 90 minutes of me attempting to tell him that when a device shows an error on the device's built-in LCD screen odds are it's a hardware problem.

That's nearly three hours of my life I'll never get back ... spent on the phone, with your Gold level technicians.

Plus the time waiting for your "quality" parts to be delivered, probably outside of the SLA.

And the time having your "quality" technician stare at me yesterday because he arrived at 4:45 and I could not shut down my production file server until 5:15.

And Roy wondered why I won't allow "technicians" to webex into my production server and poke around?

---

So Tim comes with the tape drive.

It doesn't fucking work.

And it won't until I'm back on Monday.

Cock sucking monkey fuckers.