After I made a video about it and wrote about my wretched and ongoing experience with Dell the last time on reddit, the post garnered immediate and significant attention and shot to the top of the front page within a couple of hours and stayed there for several hours after that. Thank you to all of you who voted for that story and left me your comments and advice. It strengthened my resolve not to take this sort of mistreatment lying down and here’s a followup to that story.

Past Updates

Employees from Dell called me four times on the following Monday. I was relieved that all this finally struck a cho…oh wait, they didn’t call to tell me that they were extremely sorry and that they would fix the problem once and for all. No, that would make too much sense and be far too customer-friendly for this company to do.

Instead, their calls were to ask me to return the notebook that they’d delivered to me by mistake. I hadn’t so much as cracked open the packaging by then but I flat out refused to return that notebook until they righted the situation. Why did they need to call four times? To harass me. They would not take no for an answer and I wouldn’t say yes, so I did the only thing I could: I hung up.

I then got a call from a member of Dell’s Executive Customer Support Team on Tuesday and it was the same old hemming and hawing about not being able to give me a refund because I was not the original owner and defending the company’s actions so far. Not a single word expressing regret or shame, just the businesslike manner of a person conducting a negotiation. He ended the call with something along the lines of “we’ll see if we can get you a refund but, if we do (and this in no way constitutes a guarantee), you will have to return the defective monitors first”.

Yeah, fat chance! It’s the same old crap that I’ve been dealing with for the past year. No change in attitude or action. For the purposes of full disclosure, I will make it clear that I spoke shortly with him and whenever asked to make even the tiniest concession, I rudely cut him off and refused. I think I have earned the right to.

The Seventh Monitor

The same guy called me again that day and assured me that I would be getting another monitor within a few days and that this one had been personally checked by them and was brand new and fully functional. I told him I did not want it and, at this point, the only thing I would accept was a refund. He refused. I said, “Guess I will see you in court then.” To which he replied, “Yes, we’ll meet in court.”

This leads us to today. I received the seventh replacement monitor today, the one that this guy was so cocky about, the one that Dell considers the best way to solve this problem, and it was broken. But let’s get to the quality of the display itself in a moment.

The guy who delivered the display wanted me to return the notebook that had been accidentally delivered to me back to him. I asked him for a written confirmation from Dell or DHL that I was indeed returning the notebook and he said he didn’t have anything to give me. He put me on the phone with someone from Dell logistics who told me that I wouldn’t need any such confirmation and that I should stop harassing him and the company. And he knew what I had been through, having sent all those monitors to me himself.

I asked him if he would accept it if I refused to sign on the proof of delivery document for the monitor and he said no and yet it seemed illogical to him that I should want the same thing for my own records when it came to returning the notebook. He did finally send me the document but after having rudely shouted at me and wasted a half hour of my time.

Back to the monitor now. It was physically broken at one of the corners and had huge, ugly scratches all over the actual display and was caked with dust. It’s dingy and, for all intents and purposes, looks like something pulled out of the trash can. I would not have accepted this piece of junk if it had been the first replacement they sent me, let alone the seventh one!

Take a look at these pictures:

And this video:

What I Am Going to Do

Once again, this is the seventh replacement monitor sent to me over the course of a year and that too upon realising that I’d published a story about it on reddit that had been read by tens of thousands of people! Every single employee in this company—from the engineers to the designers, the assemblers, QA specialists, the customer care department, right down to the logistics team—is mind-bendingly incompetent.

Don’t forget, these are all huge 30-inch monitors that weigh upwards of 15kg (34lbs) each and I have had to unpack, install and then uninstall seven of them; twice for each one, to replace them with the original unit. I’ve wasted days doing all that and talking to customer service executives and logistics guys and the shipping people. It’s a never-ending nightmare.

I’ve had it with this jackasses! I am not waiting for any more resolutions and am suing Dell for damages. I do not want any more replacements or refunds, I want compensation for what this company has put me through and I will get it. Thank you to everyone who is reading this for your support.

tl;dr

Dell’s seventh replacement is worse than most of the others they have sent me so far. Their employees have now taken to harassing me and being rude to me over the phone. The executive customer support representative wants to “meet me in court”, so that is what he will get.

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-Aayush