Tunnel at the End of the Light

I miscalculated how many photos I took on our trip. I think I beat G’s total – I’m pretty close to 1400. A lot are duplicates/triplicates/quadruplicates, but still…

The road sign above is from Wickenburg, Arizona, where it’s 100% tourist kitsch. I loved it.

Hopefully sooner or later I’ll be able to get in, sift through, and process more than 1-2 photos at a time before my computer crashes.

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I finally got FedEx to push through a claim on my behalf, bypassing Dell. In theory they’ll reimburse me retail price of the computer they gifted to somebody a few streets over. Fortunately, I kept EVERYTHING, including a printout of that specific refurb computer in a shopping cart on Dell’s site, showing price with tax and shipping; and the specs emailed by Dell confirming that’s the machine they were sending. FedEx now has a copy of those things.

Meanwhile, Dell pretty much kept telling me to fuck myself.

Until today.

I got another email from them today, telling me to call the police because they weren’t going to do anything, full stop. My response:

1. HELL to the NO.
2. That my claim is pending with FedEx and I’ll be using the reimbursement funds to buy a computer from any company that isn’t Dell.
3. That not only would *I* never buy another computer from Dell after this, but neither would my company, my daughter’s company, or my son’s company.
4. To send me a box and I’d gladly send back this POS computer that the other one was supposed to replace – after I buy a machine to actually replace it.
5. That the reason I wouldn’t call the police is the computer wasn’t stolen from my house. It was delivered to [address FedEx told me it was delivered to]. As they’d been told many, many, many, MANY times already.
6. That they should probably turn off their internal updates to the new computer and to brick it if they could.

All of a sudden Dell decided it was worth their trouble to “launch an investigation” into the mis-delivery. They acted like it was new information to them, instead of the same mantra I’d been chanting for nearly three weeks now.

My response was verbatim to “butt out and let me complete my business with FedEx.” That other than sending back the dead ‘puter on their dime, I don’t ever want to hear from them again, in any capacity.

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We shall see if they can keep their grubby paws out of it. If they screw me over with FedEx I’m going to probably look into taking them to court. They may have mandatory arbitration (which means they automatically win.) If that’s the case, I’ll send all the info to sites like CNET, PC Mag, etc. I have phone records, emails, and so on, some going back years, documenting how many times I’ve called, emailed, and fought through to try and get this resolved.

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While I’m cautiously optimistic FedEx will come through (provided Dell doesn’t butt in), I’m not counting my chickens before they’re fricasseed. G was watching me growl and roar into the phone at times, shocked to hear how many times I repeated the same information and got the same complete stonewall. I was on speaker phone through most of it, because it was several hours of phone calls, and I couldn’t drop everything while people picked their noses in “tech support” and “escalations”.

He believes FedEx will come through, so he’s helping me shop for a new puter.

Bless his wishful heart.

I’m giving kind of a perfunctory look at what he sends over. He’s actually really good at researching stuff like this, and normally I appreciate his input. He has a valid point about knowing what I want once the issue is settled. After so much BS, though, I don’t want to get my hopes pinned on nice new computer and Dell throws a big, sewer-soaked monkey wrench into the works.

If it matters, G sent this link over to me. It’s a lappy that gets excellent reviews, including killer battery life.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09XGR8D8K/

Definitely worth a consider.