Today’s the day you’ve all been waiting for. … Or at least, I’ve been waiting for. October 11 is the deadline I set for Dell to finish fixing up my laptop and send me a confirmation email with a tracking number letting me know my laptop has been sent back to me.

I got a voicemail from Dell a few days ago that they are unable to repair my laptop (I’m guessing due to another ridiculous reason with an easy and straightforward solution, but they didn’t specify). However, because they would like to honor the deadline I set for them (or because they’re terrified for their company’s reputation), they concluded that they would like to send me a replacement laptop.

I received a follow-up call yesterday, which I was able to answer. The customer support technician stated that he just wanted to verify that this would be okay with me, and informed me that, although they were not sure which laptop would be sent to me, it would be a laptop of equal or greater quality. He also mentioned that it would take about seven days for the laptop to go through the approval process from the management.

So here’s where I stand today.

I specifically told the technician that he had until today, October 11, 2013, to email me with a shipping confirmation. I informed him this eight days prior to the deadline I set.

Although I acknowledge that he did eventually come to somewhat of a resolution before the deadline, I still do not have the shipping confirmation in my email (and most likely will not, because he said it would take a week for it to be ready). If this was the solution they wanted to approach, they could have acted quicker (possibly deciding to do a laptop exchange the day I set the deadline), and still had a day to spare to ship out my laptop.

As a result, the deadline was not met. I will keep my side of the condition, which is to publish this entire problem as a complete and coherent story, and to publicize the poor service I received from Dell.

I will start working on writing this story once I receive my exchange laptop, so I have a specific number of how many days the entire repair process took. This will be released on my website, as well as (likely) in the form of a YouTube video.

There will then be a condensed version of this story written, to be posted on popular purchase and review websites like Amazon, and even on Dell’s own website. If the review site allows me to include hyperlinks, I will link to the full version of the story on my website.

I assume that hearing the tidbits of my story so far has convinced you that Dell’s repair service is pretty bad, and hopefully hearing the full story to be released soon will persuade you never to do business with Dell. I also hope that Dell will realize that in the age of social media, they will never again lie to their customers and make them wait over a month to get a laptop fixed, or else their reputation will be shattered to pieces.