No More Compromises

As I had mentioned yesterday, I had foolishly ordered a Dell notebook and thanks to DHL, am waiting for a trace to come back with what I expect to be a big fat “loss” of product. In contrast, I then contacted Dell and was told that if it turns up lost, they will re-build/re-ship. Yeah, like I am going to waste another two weeks with these people!

I think the most proactive thing I can do at this point is accept that I knew better than to trust Dell with any level of corporate commonsense with improving the customer experience and begin looking into proven alternatives.

Because the notebook in question is running Ubuntu, I have already contacted System76.com to find out what they might be able to do for me as I am not interested in purchasing a notebook based on Ubuntu 64bit - 64bit OS’ do nothing for me.

Speaking for myself, I will from this point forward hold companies responsible when selecting a shipping company such as DHL as the sole shipping option. While there is no question at all that all shipping agencies have lost packages, problems with deliveries, etc. The fact remains that based on my own personal experiences in the past, along with other experiences held by proxy, DHL has severe reliability issues. Then again, a quick search via Google news yielded some interesting facts on contributing factors. One of thing I was told is the Portland hub was severely understaffed. Well, laying off a 600 employees is certainly not helping things I suspect. My favorite was the apparent snow storm in the Portland area. Interesting as I too, live in that area and work with a weather reporting agency - there was no snow storm. Rather, a company opting to ’snow’ me with a line of nonsense.

I mean with package handling like this, how could anything possibly be lost, right?

At the end of the day, the choice ultimately rests with the buyer I guess. Because of the free market society, we are free to chose vendors that provide results and not excuses. Therefore I think it only makes sense to hold a company responsible when they are unable to deliver. Can you imagine running an IT business with this same level of incompetence? Those companies would be put out of business in a matter of months. We as consumers, must work to hold shipping agencies, airlines, even “big oil” responsible through our choices on how and where we consume. If we feel strongly enough against poor results provided to us, I believe that we must take our share of the responsibly by ending the enabling behavior. Fail and we boycott. It’s rather simple in my honest opinion. We live in a performance based world, so it’s time these other industries get onboard with the rest of us.