Penned Thoughts

I have a Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP 30-inch display that I had purchased from its previous owner a-year-and-a-half ago for a princely sum. It carried a warranty of three years and the previous owner had owned it for six months, so it still had most of its warranty left. It was in perfect condition when I first received it from him and I loved the display.

After about eight months of use, I noticed a faint and mostly invisible yellow tint on the left and right edges of the display. Given how huge and unwieldy this thing is, I brushed it off, not wanting to deal with all the hassles associated with a replacement. When it started growing in size and prominence, however, I was left with no choice.

I called Dell for a solution and they immediately and admirably offered me a full replacement with a refurbished unit. They even offered to send it to me in advance of my sending the faulty monitor back to them so that my work would not be impeded. I was suitably impressed.

When the monitor arrived, however, I immediately knew there was a problem. The shipping container it was in was open and a lot of the styrofoam inside was broken. I carefully lifted the monitor out of the package, only to discover that it was broken along the top. Back in the case it went and another call to Dell Customer Care followed.

They promptly apologised and offered another replacement, even though they hadn’t collected the first broken monitor from my house yet. The second monitor arrived and it had huge and very visible blue spots in the middle of the display and none of the physical display adjustment control buttons worked.

And since I had had to set it up before I could test it out, I’d spent an hour disconnecting my original display (with all the USB-based external hard drives and iPhones and everything plugged into it, it takes a while) and replacing it with this one. I called Dell again, thoroughly frustrated by now.

Let me take a moment here to comment on Dell’s Customer Care IVR system in India. While the executives you eventually get to talk to are exceedingly polite and seemingly well-educated, getting to them is no easy task. The IVR has no options for getting to the display department, so every time you call, you have to jump through several executives, none of whom know who they should forward your call to.

On an average, I spent forty-five minutes on hold every time I called, listening to a woman drone on and on about how “our customer care executive will be with you shortly”. And I had to call seven times, before I decided I had had enough and switched to Twitter-based support.

The third time, I was again offered a replacement, which I again accepted, desperately hoping that this would be the end of it. Alas, it was not to be. This third monitor also had the blue spots issue and it was kept aside as well. Another call, an e-mail and a few ‘@’ mentions on Twitter followed.

I informed the official Twitter handle @DellCares of my issue and was directed to @NiranjanAtDell, who assured me he would take care of my problems. By now, I had done some Googling and come to the conclusion that the particular model I had was similarly plagued with issues for a lot of customers around the globe. It was no accident that I had received three faulty replacements in a row—it was, it seemed to me, practically impossible to make a perfect panel for this display.

I requested Niranjan for either an upgrade to the recently released Dell UltraSharp U3011FP or a full refund. Given that I’d been stuck in this rut for two months by then and had three broken monitors lying in my room, surrounded by mounds of packaging material, I thought I was entitled to it. I was, however, turned down.

Niranjan offered to send me a brand new Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP as a replacement instead of a refurbished unit and, hoping against hope that this would be the end of it, I acquiesced.

As you can see in the video embedded above, however, that was not to be. The monitor came out of the package with a broken front panel bezel, which I fixed by pushing it into place. I turned it on, ready to overlook the slight problem with the bezel, only to be greeted with a perfect panel. Or so I thought.

Until it started emitting an irritating, ear-splitting squeal.

I turned it off and back on several times but to no avail. Pissed off beyond all recognition, I told Niranjan that I either wanted an upgrade with a full three-year warranty, as Apple had so kindly offered me when once my MacBook Pro had faced several issues 2.5 years into its life, or a full replacement. I’d had it with this piece of shit!

Over the course of one month, he agreed to a refund, but then started making a sorry excuse about only being able to refund the original purchaser. I told him that was unacceptable and he took another month, in which I reminded him thrice to give me an update, to tell me that he would do it.

In the meantime, Dell sent over someone to collect the monitors from my house. Despite being warned by my parents that I should not return the monitors without getting the refund—hold them as ransom, so to speak—I politely returned all the defective monitors to them, implicitly trusting that no matter how shoddy their product quality may be, a company like Dell would not stoop so low as to purposely screw its customers.

I was wrong.

It has now been over four months since I first contacted Dell about my issue and last I heard from them, my refund request has been cancelled and I’m now being promised an upgrade to the Dell UltraSharp U3011FP. As outrageous as that already is, I’ve been given no timeline about when that will happen—or indeed, if it will happen at all—and what the warranty status of this new display will be (I will absolutely not accept anything less than the full three-year warranty).

And this at the end of four long months of being on hold with Dell Customer Care for several hours, making notes of the service tags and serial numbers of several different monitors, speaking to literally tens of Dell executives, e-mailing them over and over, talking with them behind the scenes and publicly on Twitter, being polite, pleading and showing anger! Several times during that time, I have lifted a 30-inch display out of its package, hoisted it onto my desk and off it, plugged and unplugged cables, interrupted my work…it has been a bloody nightmare!

And I still do not have any hope for success. The only thing that is keeping me going is a strong and instinctive dislike for taking it lying down.

-Aayush