What's that they say about winning some and losing some? For fearing of writing out hashtag-winning to actually mean not winning, we will just say there's a poor guy out there who's losing majorly. Not only did his HP printer need lots of extra care and attention to work properly, but in trying to get it fixed, he suffered through the, uh, HP Repairs Department stealing an antique dresser from his front porch. HP then returned it, all boxed up and hacked to pieces.
The full story:
The initial theft wasn't exactly HP's fault.
I was living with a friend who (against my advice) bought an HP laptop. It was the third time he had to send it to them for repairs in his first 4 months of owning the thing, so by that much work with technical support, he was pissed enough that he packed the laptop with garbage as padding this time (not relevant to the rest of the story, just an amusing sidenote). He scheduled a pickup the same day my parents were having a dresser delivered to me via DHL. It was an antique dresser that my great grandfather had bought in New York when he was 20.
FedEx gets contracted by HP to pick up laptops for repair, but the FedEx driver himself has no idea what he's picking up. He just has a label that he's supposed to slap onto a package and take it. (Granted, the label is addressed to HP's repair department, so he could put 2 and 2 together, but I digress...)
This FedEx driver didn't bother to look at the label on the enormous package on our front step and see that it was already at its final destination, instead opting to simply take it with him. Unfortunately, the time he did this, all of our housemates were at class, work, etc. (hence the dresser was still sitting on the front porch).
It took us about a week to work out what had happened. The housemate's computer never got picked up. I never got my dresser. HP insisted the computer had been picked up, but wouldn't give us status on the repairs (typical), and DHL insisted that my dresser had been delivered. It was one of our other housemates who finally figured out what had happened.
If you ever want a fun afternoon, try calling HP and explaining this situation to the person you get. They kept asking me for my service tag (on the laptop, it entitles you to speak to Tech support), and I kept explaining "You're not understanding me. You all stole a dresser off of my front porch. I don't own an HP laptop because your customer service is awful and now also because you steal peoples' furniture." (On a lark, when the initial voice prompts asked me what I was having problems with I picked "storage" - ha)
Finally after navigating through a swath of managers, I spoke with a gentleman from their "super pissed off" customer department who informed me that HP "has no avenues set up to handle these sorts of claims, so there's nothing we can do for you."
I insisted "You absolutely have avenues for this. Right now we're figuring out whether it'll be customer service or legal." (I still remember the line because I was really excited to have thought of saying that in the moment instead of 30 minutes later.)
Legal threats made, they finally got me a case manager, who had the good courtesy to be appalled at the situation. His name was Guru, which was wholly appropriate, because he seemed to know everything. Within 3 days, he had my dresser boxed up and on its way back to me.
I was at work when it finally got to the house. My friend texted me. "Your dresser came in. We're taking pics now." When they sent me the pictures, I saw a carboard box of wood scraps. Upon closer examination, they seemed to have pried every board away from every other board with something like a screwdriver (judging by how badly messed up the boards were at their joints).
It's worth a sidenote here to say that when I was in college my parents were...erm.... progressive when it came to sex. They encouraged me to have sex, which nice though it sounds, is actually just unnerving when you're in your 20s. Part of this encouragement came in the form of plentiful and diverse contraceptives sent as gifts.
Mixed in with the mutilated corpse of my great grandfather's dresser was about $100 worth of lube, condoms, and dental dams, as well as about 150 coathangers. I'm sure had they been separate it would have been clear that I had well intentioned parents who heard me mention that I had stuff I needed to hang up. Taken together the message was more...maccabre.
I called Guru back "Hi Guru, it's TBM." "Oh God, what happened?" I explained the situation to him and through his sighs I heard him plotting the deaths of his coworkers.
The rest of it is pretty boring. They asked for an antiques appraisal, we had a family friend appraise the remains at far more than they would've been worth. I got a nice new dresser from overstock.com on HP's dime. I still use it today. I never did find out why, in God's name, they destroyed the dresser instead of saying "well this doesn't belong here," boxing it back up and returning the package.... the world may never know...
· What kind of asshole designs this? [Reddit via Boing Boing]
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