slate has an intriguing cover story today titled Is Dell Dying?

prophetic timing for me, since i've been cursing the once beloved company all week.

i just set up the new studio to write my book. i'm hiring a research assistant, so i bought a new desktop, and a 20-inch widescreen monitor, and finally opend the consulting laptop purchased a few months back. i ordered all three separately, all three from dell. guess how many of them worked? guess how many hours i spent with outrageously bad customer "support" on each?

admitedly, both pcs were from the dell outlet store, i.e., refurbished. but the story on those--according to many distant articles in pc mag over the years, and my own experience, was that those were even more secure than a new dell model. most had been returned within the 30-day guarantee period, and regardless, they had undergone a few weeks of real-world testing. and problems discovered would surely be repaired and not shipped out faulty again, because dell was hypersensitive to its quality ratings.

but in the arduous process of tech support on both pcs, i discovered that the problem in each had been discovered by the previous owner. dell also has a shitty tracking system for these refurbished models. in each case the supporter insisted i had already called about the product, giving me dates before my order. i soon figured out that these were the previous owners--particularly when different addresses and phone numbers were on file for my units--and that in fact, the desktop had had a faulty hard drive that prevented even an initial bootup, and the laptop had a screen so crappy you could barely make anything out.

how could either of these problems even get past the initial quality screen? if a pc won't even boot up, they're not going to catch that? if the laptop had even been started, and a person looked at the screen for two seconds to see if it was operational would have realized something was very wrong. i can see some problems getting past a quality screening, but either of these are unforgivable.

far worse, though, that another customer identified them, altered dell, who had record of each in their system, yet when the company recieved them back, just boxed them back up and shipped them out to me.

and supposedly the outlet store performs a second screening of every product, meaning again this step on the assembly line was skipped. no one turned either machine on for a routine check. no process was in place to correct even known problems, much less unknown ones.

those are signs of severe quality control problems.

but then the real nightmare started. the "support."

more on that later.