Wors World
All About Wor

On the 20th January 2008, my house was broken into and my brand spanking new Dell Vostro 1700 laptop was stolen.

 

I reported the theft to the police and was given a crime number to pass onto my insurance company which I did on the same day.  My insurance company passed me onto a third party (PowerPlayDirect) to organise the replacement of my laptop.  The third party asked me to send details of the laptop which I did the next day.  For nearly 2 weeks I then had to send and resend the information as I was told that my emails had not made it to them, was not available to them and various other reasons why they could not order my laptop from Dell.

 

Eventyually the info was received and the order was placed.  I was given a delivery date of mid Feb and told to ring the day before to confirm that it was all good.  I waited ’til the day before and rang to be told – no worries, your laptop will be delivered tomorrow betwewn 08:00 and 18:00.  I waited until 18:30 and rang to find out where the delivery was – I was told that the order had not been placed and therefore there was no delivery .

 

The order was then placed and I was given a delivery date of mid March – ring the day before just to make sure.  I rang and was told that delivery was the next day.  Of  course, the delivery was never made.  When I rang to find out why I was told the order was not placed and therefore there could be no delivery .

 

The order was then placed and my laptop was placed on the priority order list and I was given a delivery date of April 18th at the latest!  I was told that this was the latest it would be and that I should ring to find out whether the delivery date was brought forward.  I resigned myself to the 18th and thought "3 months to source a laptop!!"  On Friday 28th I received a courier card to say that they had attempted to deliver a package for me.  I’d missed the office opening hours so called the office next day at 09:00 – I was told that I’d have to ring back on Monday am to organise a redelivery.  The delivery was ordered for Tuesday the 1st of April (April Fools Day of course).

 

The courier arrived at 15:45 and at 15:50 I was called by PowerPlayDirect to see whether it had arrived – I told them that it had and that everything was OK.  I powered up the laptop and discovered that the RAM supplied was only 1G (my laptop had 3G), no inbuilt webcam (mine had a built in webcam), disk drive was half the size, screen was a cheaper version than mine etc. etc.  My laptop had cost £650 and the value of the one sent to me was about £250.  I thought April Fool finished at 12:00!!!

 

I made a call back to PowerPlayDirect and was told that the person dealing with this had gone home and would call me the next day.  I rang them bright and early to be told that a mistake had been made and that a new order would be placed with the correct spec.  I was told that I could continue using the laptop that had been delivered until my replacement arrived.  I’m now waiting for a new (4th) delivery date and once again I’m on the priority delivery list so 5 – 7 working days has been quoted.

 

I’ve asked for an event history from PowerPlayDirect as I’m raising this with my insurance company……….

 

[3/4/2008 Update]

PowerPlayDirect have written a letter to Dell complaining on my behalf.  A rather humorous note is that the reason Dell quoted the 18th April for delivery as they were waiting for the graphics card option that had been speccd – the thing is the laptop that arrived had a simple, on board graphics card only and no special graphics card at all so why the delay?