ADVENTURES IN WARRANTY LAND, and a pat on the back of sorts for HP/Compaq

So I buy this Pentium XXI with 40,000 Megahertz, 9000g hard drive, 2 g RAM, a 19" monitor, and a babe in the tower who pops out and gives me a blow job twice a day....and when I get it hooked up it turns out the CD Rom drive will not write. I can’t transfer anything from my old computer to the new one and I cannot copy essential files from inside the new one to a disc.

But it’s fast fast fast. I contact the HP customer service on line and have a long typed interchange with a clone named Kumar. After some exchanges he says he will send me the operating system discs at no charge and gives me a work order number to fix my machine.

I get their list of repair facilities and “partners” and discover that they are all Radio Shack stores. For those of you who haven’t shopped Radio Shack for a couple of years, what was once a terrific chain of stores has been replaced with commission hustlers who pay no attention to anything other that to sell you IPS, telephone time, and every other thing you can think of. I knew there wasn’t a Radio Shack in existence that could fix a computer. There was one local Best Buy listed as a warranty repair facility so I called them. The guy laid it on the line to me. They simply send the computer to the main repair facility in San Diego and wait for it to come back, a process that usually takes three to five weeks.

So in order to fix my computer under warranty I have to be without the computer for up to five weeks. I decide to actually call a human being at HP/Compaq. The guy who answered the phone had the thickest Indian accent I’ve ever heard. Welcome to customer service located in a Bombay slum in India. For all I know I’m talking to a Fundamentalist Muslim terrorist who now has my address. “Good day kind sir or madam, may I have your phone number please?”, so now the cocksucker also has my phone number. To top that off, I’m talking to a guy I could not understand. I asked him to speak very slowly and he complied. After taking me through at least twenty minutes of diagnostic tests and efforts to get my computer to write to a disc he told me he was sending me a replacement CD Rom unit and asked me if I could do the replacement myself. He added that it was simple, the directions were clear, and if it turned out I couldn’t do it he’d refer me to a shop that could do it; which may be a Muslim safe house for all I know.

So that’s customer service via India and at least they are making me whole without any hassle at all, which is all we can ask of any company ever. I just question the economics of a twenty minute long distance phone conversation with a man without English skills as compared to a customer service center in LA or New York with an American black who not only can’t speak comprehensible English too well either, but will be rude as is permissible without being fired.

I'd also suggest that were I not persistent I'd have been between a rock and a hard place.

BTW I loaded the new Word Perfect Office 12 into my machine. It’s only $69 with rebate and it’s terrific. All the tits you could ever want and easy to use. Microsoft is selling Word packaged along with their Office for $249. You cannot buy Word by itself. This is a no brainer if you are looking around. Corel has always been the best and it’s firewalled.