Rant du jour: Dell (lack of) Customer Service

I've been stuck in the hell of Dell's Technical Support call centre for the past hour. I have a very nice man in India dealing with my increasingly irate state of mind. The only problem is that he has no authority to make any decisions off the call centre's prompt sheet.

I paid Dell large amounts of money for a three year Complete Care comprehensive warranty & service contract that included Next Day/Weekend/Night On Site Technical support.

However they seem unable to tell me why I have been waiting since Saturday afternoon for a technician to ring me to make an appointment. I've had various excuses including Independence Day and 'the parts aren't in stock', but no real answers that will lower my increasing blood pressure. The problem is more acute for me now as, in the interim, the A/C adapter which was working but not charging the battery has now died completely. I have just 1hr of power left.

It wldn't be such an enormous problem if I wasn't supposed to be going into Manhattan this morning for two days/nights. No laptop = no work. I can hardly write & file features copy on my Blackberry.

My blood pressure really started to boil when the nice man told me that it would be another 2-3 days before the parts were in stock again at the warehouse near me. This is the point where I gently explained to him that Dell sell many, many laptops each day in America, each with an A/C adapter.

An A/C adapter that is in fact on sale from Dell RIGHT NOW (For $69.99 that I cannot afford & shouldn't have to pay.) However Dell's EXPRESS retail service couldn't deliver an adapter before July 13th. YUP that's EXPRESS & JULY 13th in the same sentence.

It surely couldn't be beyond the bounds of possibility to locate a new A/C adapter somewhere in this VAST country and use the services of those extremely helpful courier companies to get an adapter to me tomorrow, thereby fulfilling the contract made when I PAID them for a Three Year Complete Care comprehensive warranty & service contract that included Next Day/Weekend/Night On Site Technical support.

I'd love someone to explain to me how if I broke a binding financial contract, I would experience unpleasant consequences, but that all that happens to Dell is FUCK ALL?

I've already missed my first train this morning with this stupid rigmarole, and am about to miss the second. GOD I AM SO ANGRY

Addendum: I just found this genius excerpt over at the Dell blogsite:

"Here's any number of studies that show that consumers trust product opinions from friends, family members and other customers more than they trust what a company says about its own products" So, please, read what I wrote above and take it into account when thinking about buying a Dell product. No electronic product is infallible and if the customer support (especially the PAID FOR customer support) isn't up to scratch, then you are better off looking elsewhere.