I finally recently managed to get in touch with Dell to set up an appointment to fix my laptop.

For those of you that don’t know, my laptop’s screen was malfunctioning about a month ago, and I got it fixed under my warranty. I told them that I had a good idea that the problem was the connectors between the screen and the base of the laptop. I made this diagnosis because the webcam didn’t work well, and the screen flickered frequently.

Instead of sending a replacement for just the screen connector, they also sent a replacement for the LCD screen, inside cover, outside cover, and some weird device that went in the side of my laptop. The technician replaced everything that Dell sent him to replace, so he ended up replacing parts that weren’t broken. The worst part was that my screen covers were in new condition before, but the replacements had small scratches on them.

I didn’t make a big deal about it and just used it, until my laptop broke again. This time, instead of the screen flickering, it just completely died. I literally could not see anything that was happening with my laptop.

This happened about a month ago, and my winter break came right after the screen broke, so I just took an external monitor home and used my laptop with the external monitor. After I got back to my university campus, I talked with Dell Customer Support Chat to try and arrange an appointment with a technician.

The first representative that I spoke with was named Raghu. I explained my problem to him, and he kept giving me responses such as “Adam, I understand your concern and I will personally attend to the issue. I assure you, that I will do my best to provide you quality service.” and “Please accept my sincere apology for the inconvenience caused to you. I assure you that I will utilize all my experience and knowledge to resolve the issue to your satisfaction.” I got sick of those canned responses, so I said, “You can stop sending me canned responses and just set up a technician appointment for me, thanks.” Then he disconnected the chat.

I restarted the support chat system and got a representative named Tinny. I asked her to reconnect me to Raghu, but she claimed that doing so wasn’t possible. (I think she was lying to me, because I’ve used chat support systems before, and most of them have a feature to transfer chats among support representatives.) I had to explain my situation again, and she finally got an appointment for me set up.

A few hours later, I got a confirmation email about my support request, and I saw that she used my home phone number for the support request. This happened previous time as well – I told the support representative three times to forward my cell phone number to the technician, and not my home number, but she forwarded my home number anyway. I had to once again reconnect to the chat support to correct the problem. After the representative claimed to have changed the phone number, I said, “Could you send me another confirmation email showing that the number given to the technician has been changed because the last 2 chat support representatives claimed that they will update it but none of them actually did.”

She said that she couldn’t.

I said “I will be very disappointed if the technician dials my home number again,” and disconnected the chat.

Another interesting piece of information? While I was typing this blog post about how bad Dell’s support was, my laptop made a blood-curdling noise and randomly froze.

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So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 4

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0

Earlier today, I got back to my university’s campus in Madison, Wisconsin. I already have an interesting story to share.

I went to the Badger Herald office today to fix some of the problems that came up over the break while I was back at home. I got most of them solved pretty quickly, but one of them was being particularly difficult. While I was gone, the Photo Department started backing up their archives on the server, and it eventually ran out of space. Everything had to be backed up, but the sever was on critical space shortage, so something had to be done about it as soon as possible.

When I tried to connect to the server from my office desktop to attempt to fix the problem, another problem came up – my desktop couldn’t find the network. The internet was working perfectly fine, but none of the internet networking connections would work.

Eventually, the server space shortage problem became a networking problem, and I decided that the best thing to do at that point was to connect to the network from my laptop, transfer some older files onto my external hard drive to free up some space on the server, then copy the files over to to my desktop, which had a few terabytes of space free. The only problem was, my external hard drive was back at my apartment.

I didn’t want to wait for the bus to arrive to take me back to my apartment, then wait for the bus to get back to my apartment to bring me back to the office, so I took the Badger Herald’s car back to my apartment.

This was the first time I drove in Madison, and after this experience, I never want to drive in Madison ever again.

It seemed simple – drive west on one-way University Avenue, then turn left onto Randall Road at the intersection until I see my apartment.

What Google Maps didn’t tell me was that the intersection is the most confusing intersection on the planet. Not only is it an intersection of east-west University and north-south Randall, but it is also the intersection of a random street named Campus Drive that comes in from the northwest and cuts through diagonally. It forms a ridiculous triangle shape in the intersection, and it’s impossible to accomplish anything in that area.

So I passed it.

And kept driving into the University Bay area.

And I thought that the only place that had a bay was San Francisco.

I soon approached the University Hospital, and I finally realized that I was going the wrong way. I frantically looked for a place to turn left and turn around, and I found a random parking lot to turn into, do an awkward u-turn, then get back onto the road going in the opposite direction.

The only problem is, University Avenue is a one-way street, and the street right next to it going eastbound is some other random street that leads off into the abyss.

After somehow making it back to familiar areas, I saw the Chemistry building, which made me ridiculously excited, as I finally knew where I was. (Last semester, I passed the Chemistry building every school day to get to my lectures.) In my excitement, I quickly turned right because I knew that my apartment was to the south of Chemistry.

A few seconds later, I realized that I turned right into a northbound one-way street, and that I was going the wrong way.

I managed to wiggle my way out of the one-way street and kept driving until I finally made it back to my apartment.

After picking up the external hard drive from my apartment, I got back into the car to drive back to the office. I felt more relieved because on the way back, I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near University Avenue, as University Avenue is a westbound road and I had to go east. I got on eastbound Johnson Street and started driving.

Until I saw flashing police vehicle lights behind me.

I pulled over to the side of the road and waited for the police officer. I had no idea what I could have possibly done wrong – I don’t speed in general, but I definitely don’t speed in an area that I’m unfamiliar with, so I knew it wasn’t that. It was possible that the Badger Herald car itself had a problem, and that seemed to be the most logical explanation, so I calmly waited, assuming that there was nothing wrong with anything that I myself was doing.

The police officer approached the car and asked me to pull down the window. The only problem was that I barely knew how to use the Badger Herald’s car in the first place, and couldn’t find out how to lower the window. I opened the door instead, and the police officer said,

“I pulled you over because your headlights and back lights are not on.”

Then I realized that the Badger Herald’s car was about a decade old, and the headlights and back lights were not automatic, unlike like all the other cars that I’ve driven in the past.

He asked me why I didn’t have them on, and I told him about my situation. He told me to turn them on, and I think that at that point it was clear to him that I really didn’t know how to use the Badger Herald car when I went to turn on the headlights and accidentally turned on the windshield wipers. After verifying that it was actually a mistake and that I had no malicious intent, the officer went back to his vehicle, and after a few minutes, came back with a pamphlet with information about the Madison Police Department.

I was let go, and finally, in about three times the amount of time that it should have taken me, I finally got back to the Badger Herald office.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 2 (+2 today)

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0