Laptop Catastrophe

Dell Workers in India, Texas and Canada Spring Into Action

By Dan Rattiner

In September, I was in my living room, writing a story for this newspaper while periodically glancing up to look out at the boats in Three Mile Harbor, which is always fun to do, when I decided to make myself a cup of coffee. I left the laptop on, came back five minutes later, sat down, and went into shock. There were three cracks running down the left side of the computer screen from a single point at the top where it looked like something had hit it. Spreading out from the cracks were black blotches of ink. All of this was enclosed within the screen.

I immediately tried to save what I had written up until that point, trying to escape from the blobs, and what do you know, it worked. Indeed, everything worked. I immediately backed things up. I’d abandon ship. Women and children first.

Losing a laptop like this, and this is the first time I have had this experience, is several steps down from losing a child, but small steps. It took several minutes for me to gain my composure.

Finally, after lying down, and hyperventilating for a while, I got up from the sofa, sat back down at my desk and called Dell. I did remember I had purchased a top-dollar repair service where they come the very next day. After several minutes talking to mechanical voices, I got through to a human with a strange accent.

“How did it happen?” he asked.

“It must have been an accident of some sort,” I said. “Maybe it hit something or something hit it earlier in the day to set it off the break.”

“I have you up on the screen,” the man said. “Your service agreement doesn’t cover accidental damage. It covers software and hardware damage but not accidents. You will have to send it in. Then they will fix it and send it back.”

“How long will it take?”

“Depends, but about twelve working days.”

“Can they give me a loaner?”

“Afraid not.”

The idea of not having my laptop for twelve days was impossible. I write every day. Mostly out of doors. I moaned audibly, and the moan went out through the telephone and halfway around the world to Bombay, which is where I learned at the end of the conversation, he was.

“You could upgrade your service to next day for everything,” the man said. “Then they could come to you.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Retroactively, for this repair?”

“I think so. I can connect you to service contract sales, but let me give you the number too in case we get disconnected.”

Service Contract Sales turned out to be a young sounding woman with a twang. She was, I learned in that conversation, in Austin, Texas, which by the way is the mother ship world headquarters for Dell.

“You already have the highest level of service possible,” she said. “Hmmm. You sure this was an accident?”

I caught her drift. “It could have been anything,” I said. “I was in another room when it happened.” All true.

“Call service back and tell them you don’t know HOW it happened.”

And so I went back, this time to service in, well, I never did really find out where. And by that time I had a real extra good story and I wanted to sound panic stricken and too distracted to get chummy. All of my real good story was absolutely true. Though slightly irrelevant. But it would look good.

“I’ve had three things going wrong,” I said sounding so dissatisfied with this piece of junk. “There’s a small slot on the front of the computer where you put a memory card in that has popped off its cover. I don’t know where it went. Just popped. Sand or dirt could get in. (Mostly sand. — ed.) I need another. The second thing is the amount of time it takes when you boot it up from pressing the on button. Sometimes it takes four minutes. Other times just one minute. It’s all over the lot. So it needs to be checked out. And now the screen broke.”

“How did that happen?”

From the accent — Boston, Oregon, Finland? Somewhere in North Country.

“Just broke. Went in for coffee, came back, it was broke. Maybe it was defective.”

My North Countryman swung into full action.

“You qualify for next working day on site service,” he said. “Today is Friday. It’s four p.m. where you are. I’ll put this in for Monday. They should get the part Tuesday morning. They’ll call and they’ll come to you.”

He gave me a confirmation number, a tracking number for the part, and he told me they would call me when they had the part. I figured I’d work indoors near an AC outlet on a desktop until Tuesday. I was not happy about this. But hey, they were trying.

It also occurred to me that their getting a replacement part for this laptop screen was not going to be as easy as it sounded. Dell, as you know, builds everything in their own factories. But in one case, a year and a half ago, they made a deal with Sanyo to sell THEIR laptop. There was a need for a very lightweight very small laptop with a five-hour battery (I needed one), and they weren’t getting it together fast enough to get one to market. Thus the Sanyo deal. They’d divide up the world. Sanyo would have everywhere else but America. And Dell would have them in America, with a label on them reading DELL X1. The deal would be for two years. And it was during that time I bought mine.

Sure enough, there was no call on Tuesday. We rattled the cage a bit to no effect. But then the call came at 4 p.m., Wednesday. I took it on my cell phone standing in front of a Starbucks at 93rd Street and Broadway in Manhattan.

“Whenever you’re ready,” this crackly male voice said over the phone. Where was he? Iceland? Sounded like he was up in an airplane. “We’ve got the part. Or at least one of the parts.”

“Big or little?” I asked.

“Big.”

“Good.”

I told him I’d be in the office in Bridgehampton the next day, Thursday, at 4 p.m. for an editorial meeting.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

“And then at 6, we have a clambake at the beach for the staff, and I’m inviting you if you’re done.”

“I’ll be done.”

“Bring your surfboard.”

So overnight, it seems, meant six days. But you know what? I appreciated it. And another thing. Somebody showed me how to move the margins for my writing off to the right part of the screen. I could allow the blobs to control the left side of my screen and, as long as they didn’t bother me, I wouldn’t bother them. We’d both do our thing. From Friday to today, which is Thursday, six hours before this guy parachutes down to our front lawn with his tool kit, I’ve been getting along fine on the right while the blobs handle the left.

Indeed, this very article is written alongside the blobs. Hi guys. What a world.