July 6th, 2007
Day 6 of the old coffee-in-the-keyboard trick
Here we are in the the sixth day of my coffee-in-the-keyboard adventure. Here’s a quick review of the situation:
- My post describing day 1 presented how I stupidly allowed coffee to slosh into my new laptop and did my best to engage Dell Computer’s service department in the hopes of getting Dell to honor it’s “on-site, next business day” service contract.
- My post describing day 2 presented my experiences working with Dell’s service department to determine what was going to be done and when.
- My post on day 3 presented my experiences with a really great tech, Steven Buczak of Qualxserv. Steve came to my office and did the usual things an excellent service tech does:
- He produced the required volume of sulphuric-smelling smoke (the cats ran for cover immediately)
- He waved the exquisitely embroidered bag of chicken bones over the machine the indicated number of time
- In spite of all of this, his heroic efforts didn’t bring the machine back to life. So, the machine was shipped “next day express” to Dell’s repair depot.
- Days 4 and 5 were consumed by DHL and the July 4th holiday here in the U.S. Due to the holiday, the machine was delivered to the Dell repair depot early (7:35 AM local time if DHL’s tracking service is to be believed) on Thursday (day 5 of this adventure). I received an automated call from Dell’s service at about 4:30 PM Thursday telling me that the machine had arrived. It’s my guess that the laptop sat in a pile of boxes awaiting processing for the better part of the day.
Now we’re in day 6 of my adventure in Dell-land and I’d like to give you an update. With my best tone of mock sincerity, I must inform you that I’m glad I purchased that on-site, next-business-day contract.
While trying to continue working on Kusnetzky Group projects, I discovered that two documents didn’t get copied from my production system (the dead Dell laptop) to my file server for some reason. When one considers what a disaster this could have been, misplacing a couple of files isn’t all that bad. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that those files are still sitting on the disk waiting for the mothership, that is the Dell laptop, to land.
Project deadlines being what they are, I find myself facing a reconstruction job. I have to replace those two documents today.
I’d like to thank all of the folks who’ve sent email offering suggestions on the best ways to get Dell to expedite the service of the machine, pointers on where to find another machine so I can continue working on various projects and sharing their own horror stories about repair services in general and Dell’s repair services in specific.
What have you done to deal with a situation such as this one?
Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group. He is responsible for research and publications on a broad array of technology topics. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements. You can follow Dan on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Virtually Speaking via Email alerts or RSS.
