My new Dell laptop should have arrived, but it was already midday and no sign of the truck pulling down the driveway. I called FedEx only to discover that not only had Dell put a return on my order from the 
Consumer Division (which was what they were supposed to do) but they had gone ahead and ordered the return of the one from the Small Business Division as well (which was not what they were supposed to do.) It seemed the entire ordeal of ordering a laptop from Dell was turning into a French farce.
I begged the FedEx rep to undo the damage.
"No," they told me. "Unless you can get Dell to call us and explain what's going on, both of these puppies are headed for a plane ride back to the factory."
I tried reaching the Small Business division rep, but he didn't answer the phone, which left me once again at the mercy of Dell's Consumer Division phone screen. Sure enough, they have no prompt to describe the specific issue I was facing, so I was left to just pushing buttons in order to try to find anyone who would speak to me.
Yet another woman with an accent (this time named "Missy") answered my call. Missy acknowledged that Dell had, in fact, notified FedEx to not deliver either computer. When I questioned how this could be possible, I expected yet another overly solicitous apology. This time I didn't get one. Instead Missy suggested that perhaps I had canceled both orders. There you go: a lesson from Dell in dealing with crabby customers- deflect the blame and tell the customer it's his own damn fault they messed up.
Well, by now it was too late for FedEx to deliver, and despite having paid dearly for expedited door-to-door shipping, I had to abandon work, get in my car and drive half an hour each way to pick up the computer before it found itself on a cargo plane being returned to Dell. This part went smoothly (thank you, FedEx) and finally I had the computer in my hands.
The whole ride back I thought about this blog and about how I would end this saga. What could I write that would punctuate my point about Dell and why I would never buy a thing from them again? You know how anticlimactic some endings can be. Well, Dell helped me out with this, so I'm grateful to them for giving me an ending to this story that's far better than anything I could have come up with. Truth really is better than fiction: I unpacked the laptop, plugged it in and turned it on. Within 10 seconds I was looking at the "Blue Screen of Death." You read that right: It failed right out of the box.
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