Ok, before I begin, I would like to state that I will try to be as courteous as possible throughout this story. I don’t like to swear a lot and I think that overusing swears lessens the appeal of the story. As a result I’ll keep most of the swears out but I’ll give you this nice legend to help express how I felt during my customer service experience with Hewlett Packard. So when you see the following words or a derivative of them, replace them with the equivalent word:
Wonderfully helpful customer service representative = incompetent fucktard
HP = Poor fuckin excuse for an international computer company.
Put on hold = Told to wait while this confused inept moron went to find out what to do next because he is A FUCKING MONKEY.
Bless me = Fuck me
Plausible reason = bullshit
Ok here we go.
Early August
My laptop dies, done, unusable. I’m still under warranty so I call up HP and they tell me they’re going to send me a box for me to send back the laptop for repair. Pretty standard stuff, they would get the laptop, fix it, send it back, and if they can’t repair it, they send me a replacement. The whole process takes about 9 days, says the website
August 11
So I get the box, send it to hp through UPS and wait. They had a shipping label on the box, so all I had to do on my end was box up the computer, and drop it off at ups. Now normally, it’s pretty quick to get where it needs to be. I sent in a defunct hard drive once, and the next day I got a confirmation of receipt email.
This time however, a couple of days pass.
No email.
A week and a half passes.
No email. At this point, I’m a little concerned so I decide to call hp and find out what’s going on. Now I’ve dealt with some really bad customer service before but never in my life has it been so bad then it has been with HP. The wait on hold is long enough for someone to grow a five o’clock shadow and have to shave it. The wonderfully helpful customer service representative finally comes on and asks me all the vital information to look up, and puts me on hold again so he could look up my account. Several minutes pass by and he comes back on to tell me that yes, the repair shop does have my laptop and it shouldn’t be much longer. The reason I didn’t get an email was because “sometimes they don’t send emails for confirmation that they received my product.” which rings the “plausible reason” meter in my head a little bit, but since they have my computer, I’m willing to let it slide. Sigh of relief, right?
Another 2 weeks pass.
I don’t have my laptop. I call HP again. In fact, just to advance the story a little bit, I ended up calling them a total of 3 times, was put on hold for a total of 168 minutes and was told the exact same thing ”yes, we have your laptop in the shop. It must be that parts are on backorder and hopefully it shouldn’t be much longer.” First of all, how incompetent are you that it takes 45 minutes just to look that up? Second, how long does it take to order parts? Are you making them yourself, by hand?
Mid September
The fourth call was a little different from the last ones. After being put on hold, which I’ve actually grown accustomed to, (I call them, run some errands around the house while waiting to get through) the following conversation occurred:
Customer service representative: ” uhhh, did you ship your package with Fedex?”
“no, it was ups”
“Are you sure it wasn’t Fedex?”
“Yeah I’m pretty sure that when I drove to the big brown store that has a big UPS sign on it to drop off my package, that it wasn’t fed ex”
“Oh ok… One moment please.”
I started thinking, “wait do they have my computer or not? It would make sense if they didn’t; I mean it’s been a month when they said it would be days. It would also make me very motherhumping pissed, that have I been lied to the past THREE times I’ve called in concerning my personal merchandise that costs 1000$.
The wonderfully helpful service representative comes back on:
“Yeah it seems to me that your laptop has been shipped to the wrong address.”
“What… Where is it?”
I’d like to quickly note that I have been very patient with these trained monkeys not wanting to make the situation any worse.
“Yes sir, it says here that the address that it was sent to is the hp returns and replacement center and not the repair center.” I pause and take a step back because my brain is about to go ballistic and I didn’t want to yell at this little Filipino guy for fear that the situation would worsen.
“Ok… So the last 3 guys lied to me then, is that what you’re telling me? How am I going to get my laptop back? Will I ever get it back?”
“…Please hold sir.”
BLESS ME.
What ended up happening was that we conference called with a guy from UPS to try and track down my laptop. Since they couldn’t find it right away, they said they’d call me when they do. Which doesn’t sound good enough for me, you either find it or you don’t. There is no in between. You don’t go to work one day and think “well today, I’m gonna keep looking for this guy’s laptop.” It doesn’t take that damn long. Just get me a computer, now. What made this part of the story worse was that to help the guy look for it I told him that there was a big Flames sticker on the front. He says that won’t help because he’s a Vancouver Canucks fan. Jokes now. Okay, yeah, that’s the mood I’m in. I wanted to crack this guy’s skull open with my invisible non existing laptop.
Someone is at fault here. And it sure as hell isn’t me. Either the shipping label was wrong and my laptop is now lost, or the delivery driver had a brain aneurism and drove 400 km to the wrong place. Most likely the former. It’s my laptop. It’s under warranty. It’s HP’s responsibility to find it.
It’s been a month since this call took place. A day ago, I received a call from a HP rep that said he was going to do all he can physically locate my computer. If he can’t find it, chances are that HP will issue me a claim for my computer.
October 30th.
At this point even if I got a computer, it would be too late in the semester to start using it for school. I get a call from HP. It’s the claims department. They’re sending me a new laptop and although they’re apologetic about the incident, they try and lowball me, offering me a laptop with similar specs to the one that they had lost. They are HP after all. No way I says, no fucking way. I ask for a better laptop because I have been sitting here in grief for close to 3 months laptop-less. They, of course have to agree given the situation, in my opinion. After being on hold, they agree. They ship the laptop, no questions asked.
Today is November 6th
The new laptop came yesterday. I am writing this on it. What have I learned from this experience? Have I grown since the beginning of August? Maybe a little more bitter at the world. The way I see it, if you want to get something done, do it yourself. In this situation I had no control over anything, which was the worst part. None of it was in my hands. I had to talk with a guy from technical support that is based in the Philippines to find out what’s going on with my computer in Canada. Ugh. Throughout this whole mess I was civil, I was calm, and I was patient. Would I have gotten what I did if I was some loudmouth asshole who was acting out to get what I wanted? I don’t think so. I’m just glad it’s all over with.
