Today’s bit of joy dealing with customer disservice comes to us courtesy of Amazon.
Now, don’t get me wrong…Amazon has been a god-send during the pandemic to keep me out of the brick-and-mortar germnasiums and help with practicing social distancing (yay!) without having to wear a mask (not so yay!).
And to be fair, the vast majority of orders come through quickly and correctly though they could certainly add a bit more padding in the boxes to keep things from banging round. The few times I’ve had to return something, it’s generally been pretty painless.
That is until today.
Soooooo…the reason we’re here is that CALLISTO, the evil laptop of mine that Nick has been using for his virtual school lessons has been on her last legs for quite a while. Considering she’s over 10 years old and only really had a couple of battery swaps along the way…that’s pretty impressive for a laptop that runs Windblows! Well, we’re at the point where the power/charging circuit is royally buggered and it’s pretty much game over.
I tried to avoid replacing the laptop as much as I could but sadly we’re there now. Yesterday, I found a decently powerful gaming laptop for a pretty decent price which should be more than sufficient for Nick to run Premiere Pro for the occasional video editing. Actually, that laptop might well give MALEFICENT a run for her money in terms of power so I pulled the trigger fairly quickly…I just didn’t have time to really screw around on this project.
I was amazed it arrived today right after the backups had completed and was totally ready to migrate the kids over to it until I discovered that the laptop that was sent in near record time was not the one I ordered. Half the RAM and a quarter of the SSD as well as some dodgy-looking security sealing tape and a Best Buy shipping label that makes me think this laptop isn’t brand new isn’t going to cut it and so off to Amazon customer service we go.
Sadly, it’s not easy to actually get human beings at Amazon if you’re wanting something more complex than what a chat-bot or the straightforward return an item via Kohl’s process which works very well. Truth be told, it’s actually a complete pain in the butt even finding the link to the page where you put in your phone number for them to reverse-connect you to the representative which says wonders about how much they actually want to talk to you live and in living colour.
Well, let’s just say the two humans (by the time I actually got them on the phone) were actually less useful than the tools I already had available to me.
I hadn’t realised that the laptop wasn’t actually sold by Amazon (and it was my own damned fault I didn’t look as close at the seller reviews as I should have). However, that fact became patently clear when that very easy returns policy for Prime members was nowhere to be seen even though it had been bought under the aegis of my Prime membership for the free shipping.
Here’s the rub…if Amazon sells it or fulfills it…they’ll stand behind the product and fix any issues pretty painlessly. However, if they didn’t sell it…you’re basically thrown to the wolves and you’ve got to hope for the best that the seller is not a dodgy bugger. In this case, someone else got a Best Buy sticker on their box as well which I should have caught but like an idiot…I didn’t.
That left me two choices that I offered the seller:
- I can make the laptop they sent work for what I had intended with some additional memory and storage for a substantial but fair refund.
- Return the laptop and scramble like hell for a new one to have ready for Nick’s lessons tomorrow.
Right now, it looks like the seller might well go for option #1 with the condition that the laptop that I have yet to see is actually functional and usable and not someone dumping open-box rejectamenta on me.
Lesson learned.
Of course, I thoroughly loved how Amazon was perfectly happy to wash their hands of the thing and not even offer some measure of compensation on their own behalf for a *PRIME* customer who is having to deal with a situation that should *NEVER* been allowed to happen in the first place.
Yes…enjoy that heaping helping of a degraded customer service experience for *FREE* and just plain lump it. Human customer service representatives going out of their way to piss off a customer and then hide behind “policy” and let the customer leave the call angry and dissatisfied is pretty much the pinnacle of incompetence.
Harry…it sucks! 🙁
UPDATE (04 Feb 2021): after a few EMAILs back and forth with the seller, it turns out that the laptop actually does have the 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD (that’s just been joined by another 500GB NVMe SSD I had laying about after spending two hours trying to install a secondary hard drive and giving up because the connector ribbon cable is way too short).
So now I’m into a few hours of reloading data and applications in time for Nicholas to attend his early morning classes…even though I’m going to be dead-dog tired by the time I’m done with this, it’s still better than him trying desperately to use a laptop that was hopelessly buggered.