[[!meta title="List of support fiascos"]]

## Introduction

Dealing with a lot of hardware (in the sense of moving/maintaining)
involves some support from vendors. Sometimes vendors are doing a
particular bad job. This blog page is dedicated to vendor screwups and
document real stories.

## The support for a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (2019-11-16 - IN PROGRESS)

I ordered this particular notebook on 2019-09-19 and it arrived around
2019-09-27. So far so good. However shortly after starting to use it,
I managed to get a somewhat-stuck key (the "p key"), which
more-or-less randomly hangs/does not produce a character. As some of
my passwords contain a p, this led to very frustrating login failures.

Having a stuck key like this after less than 2 months of use is really
not showing good quality, so I reported this issue with Dell on
2019-11-16. With the device I bought the so called
"Complete Care Service" and "Premium Support". In theory reachable
24x7.

In practice, after opening the support request on 2019-11-16, I did
not receive a real reply on the following Monday. So I reached out
again and got a reply on Tuesday, already being late if it was only
next business day (NBD) support.

After reporting that issue additionally the rubber below that keeps
the notebook stable on the table began to detach itself from the
notebook. Only another minor problem, but clearly nothing to expect
from a quality device.

After a long forth-and-back via Twitter DM about the device heat and
whether the p key still occasionally is stuck (yes!) there was
eventually a replacement scheduled for the 26th of November.

However - you can guess it - nobody showed up. The log at Dell says
that somebody tried to reach me, however there was no missed calls on
any of my numbers. And no email or no direct message. So even if
somebody tried to call, they did not bother sending an email.

Until I reached out again, after I got a message that the phone number
is forwarded. It continues "funny" like that: on 26th there was no
further communication from Dell. No message, no call, no email.

However when logging in to the Dell portal, Dell rescheduled the
appointment for Thursday, 28th, 0800.

Independently on how the story evolves from here, the amount of time
spent into the support, waiting, replanning locations, etc. is already
exceeding the worth of the product. So I can clearly disrecommend
buying this device/support combination, if you want to professionally
work with it.


[[!tag hardware support]]