Dell Still on My Mind, Although Taking a Back Seat to Hurricane and Vacation

While Katrina for the time being has rendered insignificant our stories involving battles with Dell customer service, and we've reached the midpoint of our stay at the lakehouse for some much needed battery recharging, I've taken a brief respite from my documentary feed. Although out of sight, Dell remains on my mind. My mother just shot me this from Slate's Daniel Gross: "Is Dell Dying?". Also, Steve Rubel offers up some advice for Dell, proposing a link for Dell praise dellpraise and complaints dellcomplaints.

Third Installment of Dell and Me Documentary

Louise Lee writes on BusinessWeek online today:

John Hamlin, Dell's senior-vice president for the U.S. consumer business, says Dell is adding more call centers, each employing about 2,000 workers, and improving training for phone reps.

"The customer experience is one of the most important issues for us," says Hamlin, adding that a year ago, to make sure customers' machines are working, Dell began contacting those who its records show have sought help at least three times over the course of one week.

If, in fact, Mr. Hamlin's sincere, how is it possible that there are so many disgruntled folks out there? Could it be that Dell's initiative will require several years to gain traction? Maybe Dell's still working on the list of customer names beginning with "A" and has yet to get to the "B's," which would explain why Jeff "J"arvis had to labor so hard to be heard.

So, here's the third installment of Dell and Me. More to come.

Second Installment of Dell and Me Documentary

I realized after posting a link to Shel's blog and reading his reply that there are still things I need to learn about blog etiquette. I'm new to this medium, so my missteps and fumbles will be par for the course. Apologies to anyone else in advance. Thank you Shel for taking the time to reply.

Also, click here to display Installment 2. Once again, I've learned another lesson: my coding skills need refreshing. You'll need to click on the first installment's stop button to avoid having both installments play simultaneously. Sure, there's a way to prevent this from happening by writing and inserting the appropriate line of code into my index file, but I haven't figured that one out yet.

Enjoy. The fun's about to begin.

Dell and Me Documentary

Starting today, and continuing, I will attempt to post portions of my mini-documentary, "Dell and Me," which details a recent experience I had when my Dell Dimension XPS machine ceased to operate. It was 15 days until Dell was able to ship parts that enabled the machine to power on . . .until a system crash wiped out the hard drive and gave cause for a complete reinstallation of my operating system. All of my data was lost, not to mention a good amount of my time and patience.

Needless to say, it has been a roller coaster of a ride with this product from Dell. While I was most surprised and discouraged by the computer's malfunction, I was dumbfounded by the hurdles I had to jump in order to get some assistance.

To view the first part of my documentary, click on www.buyadellnowgo2hell.com. Apologies, but I am new to streaming video and haven't yet figured out how to include the entire video, which is about 45 minutes long, on this site. So I'll put it up in sections, and continue to work out a better format.