Penned Thoughts

If you read this blog at all or follow me on Twitter, you know by now that Dell has sent me four replacements for a Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP monitor I had purchased a couple of years ago and that started having yellow tinting issues about six months ago. It had about one-and-a-half years of warranty left at that point and still has a year to go and apparently Dell cannot fix it for me.

After getting four faulty replacements, I was thoroughly pissed off and requested a refund. It was initially agreed upon and then cancelled a few weeks later. They then offered me an upgrade to the recently launched Dell UltraSharp U3011FP and backtracked on that another few weeks down the line.

I was called by @NiranjanAtDell, who offered to send me another Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP as a replacement, which I wasn’t willing to accept because I knew it would be just as broken as all the other monitors they had sent me before and because the company wouldn’t extend my warranty to its standard three-year duration, which I felt was the least bit of compensation they could offer me.

Outrageously enough, this guy also had the audacity to suggest to me that since it seemed damn near impossible for the company to properly produce one Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP, perhaps I would like a downgrade to a cheaper monitor in the interest of at least getting one without any flaws.

I mean, can you imagine how much animosity a company would need to have towards its customers to actually suggest something like that? Since they cannot manufacture a monitor, instead of refunding the customer’s money or offering him an upgrade to a better monitor, they want to saddle him with one that is worse instead.

I try not to take my anger out on customer service representatives because I always have this thinking that these guys are just having to do a horrible job that they have little control over, but at that point I could not suppress my rage. I gave him as polite a verbal lashing as I possibly could and stated in no uncertain terms that I neither wanted another broken 3008WFP as a replacement nor a downgrade.

But guess what? They sent me another 3008WFP, a fifth one, anyway. Think about this: They sent me five 30-inch monitors! I mean, forget customer service, this is stupid even from a purely financial standpoint. It’d have been much cheaper to have just handed me a replacement or a working upgrade after their second replacement turned out to be a dud.

Almost like a machine, thoroughly rehearsed as these steps were for me, I pulled the giant 30-inch display out of the packaging, hauled it over to the bed and placed it on it. I unscrewed the VGA cable that was plugged into it and then set about disconnecting my Drobo, keyboard and other peripherals from my original monitor. Needless to say, this is all very cumbersome and I wasn’t thrilled about having to go through this routine for the twelfth time (and yes, I counted)!

When I finally plugged the replacement monitor in and turned it on, I spotted them almost immediately: Several prominent blue spots all over the screen, as can be seen in the photographs above. Why did I even bother? I am using it right now, blue spots and all, but I know I will eventually have to go through the whole disconnection process again and re-install the original one.

Pardon me for the rudeness, but I just have to say this:

DELL, YOU ARE A SODDING PRICK OF A COMPANY! DEALING WITH YOU AND YOUR EMPLOYEES HAS BEEN THE MOST DEGRADING AND FRUSTRATING EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE. GO STUFF YOUR FACES UP YOUR REAR ENDS, YOU BASTARDS!