I’ve never had a delivery experience worse than the one I had two weeks ago with DHL. The incompetence of their service was almost astounding.
It all started on the evening of Thursday, August 4, when my laptop’s power supply stopped working. It had been acting up for weeks, failing to provide power for a moment, then working again once I fiddled with the cable. Just a loose conneciton, I figured. But that night, it quit working for a couple hours straight, and I knew I needed a new one. My battery lasts for three hours or so, but not long enough to finish up all my work for that evening, let alone any longer.
It was too late to pick up anything that night. Laptop power supplies are specific enough pieces of equipment that general computer parts stores like Best Buy and CompUSA were very unlikely to have what I needed in stock. And the biggest wrinkle — I was driving to Idaho early the next morning, taking my parents out to visit my sister at her new place in Caldwell. So I might not even have time to pick up a part at a local Toshiba service center before leaving town. It was also too late to order something online and have it reach Caldwell on Friday by overnight delivery. If I wanted to catch up on all my pending freelance work, I’d have to either pick up a power supply early the next morning at a local Toshiba service center, or find a place online that could send the part overnight on Friday, to reach Caldwell on Saturday.
I checked online and found a Toshiba service center down in Tigard, and found that they opened at 7:30 a.m. So if I got an early start, I could pick up the part I needed and leave town for Idaho without falling too far behind schedule. But what if they didn’t have the part in stock? There was no Toshiba service center in Idaho as far as I could determine, so I might very well have to have the part delivered.
As luck would have it, I managed to get my power supply working again later that night, after fiddling with it for about 45 minutes — finally finding the perfect spot to crimp the cable so that the wires once again passed power to my laptop. I held that crimp in place with about a dozen rubber bands, and hoped for the best. It wasn’t enough, though. It could quit working again at any moment, and I had to have a reliable backup.
Late that Thursday night, I found several possibilities at CNet’s shopper.com, and kept them bookmarked for possible follow-up early Friday morning. And when the morning came, and I found out that the Toshiba service center didn’t have my part in stock and would have to order it themselves, I hit the web again. None of the places I tried listed an overnight Saturday delivery service, but I couldn’t let that stop me. Luckily, GetPartsOnline.com said over the phone that if I paid an extra fee, they could send it by FedEx later that day, for Saturday delivery to Caldwell, Idaho. Great. I ordered.
I wasn’t too worried when they called my cell phone a little later, telling me that FedEx didn’t make Saturday deliveries to Caldwell, because they could send it with DHL instead, and I’d have my emergency delivery on schedule. I was a little more worried, though, when the Saturday spent at my sister’s new Idaho apartment passed into late afternoon without a knock on the front door, or, at least, a package left surreptitiously outside. I called DHL, who helpfully told me that they don’t make Saturday deliveries to Caldwell, but they’d have my delivery to me as soon as possible on Monday. But I was leaving town again early Monday morning, driving my parents back home. A Monday delivery to Caldwell wouldn’t work. So the operator asked me for a forwarding address, and she told me they could have it to my parents’ house in Vancouver, Washington, on Monday. This was already an unaccptable delay, but at least my crappy old power supply was still limping along. If I hadn’t stumbled upon my rubber band solution, I would have been screwed. Work had to get done. Freelance clients aren’t likely to be happy when I take a few full days off witihout advance warning.
So I enjoyed the rest of the weekend, and got a bunch of work done (although using my cell phone’s bluetooth connection for Internet access on my laptop is almost unbearably slow — slower than I remember dialup being, even
But wouldn’t you know it — speak of the devil, and your power supply problems shall reappear. Within 15 minutes of making that call, the power supply stopped working again, and try as I might I couldn’t recrimp the cable successfully. The Toshiba service center would still have to order the new power supply if I went that route, but perhaps I could still get my rogue DHL package delivered to Vancouver the next day. I called DHL again.
I asked them to cancel the “return to sender” request I had made in haste. No problem, they told me. I asked them why my package was still in Idaho, when they had told me two days earlier that they’d send it on to Vancouver. Apparently, in order for a delivery to be rerouted the sender has to fax DHL with approval, and with the new delivery address. Which is absolutely retarded. How can the sender know whether delivery conditions have changed since they sent the thing off? But DHL wouldn’t budge. So I called GetPartsOnline.com to find out if they could fax DHL with the necessary authorization. The guy who answered the phone told me that it was late (close to 8:30 p.m. on the east coast, where his office is apparently located), and he was the only one still there. The fax wouldn’t be a problem, he said, just call back in the morning and they’ll arrange everything.
But I needed to receive this package in the morning, I pointed out. A fax sent the next day wouldn’t do me much good. So he kindly offered to help out — if I could get DHL to fax him the form he needed to fill out, he’d fax it back to them. Yay. I called DHL again, and spoke with a new operator — my fourth DHL operator since Saturday. I recapped my situation, and asked her to fax the necessary form to the guy at GetPartsOnline.com. “You shouldn’t be doing any of this,” she told me, seemingly puzzled that I might take an interest in how soon I receive my emergency delivery. “This should all be done by the sender.” Well, the sender doesn’t know that the address needs to be changed unless I tell them, and — friendly and helpful though he was — the one guy at the sender’s office clearly wasn’t interested in shepherding the package through DHL’s arcane set of procedures. If I wanted to get this thing delivered, I’d have to make sure it got done myself.
So I gave GetPartsOnline.com‘s fax number to the DHL operator, and asked her for the number to which the sender should send his completed form. She gave me the fax number for an Idaho DHL center, where the package was still located. Alrighty. I called the GetPartsOnline.com dude again and told him to look for the fax.
Several minutes later, he called back and told me that DHL had sent him the wrong form. It was the type of form you fill out to allow DHL to leave a package at your door without a signature, apparently, and had nothing to do with rerouting a delivery to a new address. Sigh. Another call to DHL, another operator to join in the fun. After my sob story in a nutshell, the new operator told me that there was no form for rerouting a package. They just needed a general written authorization on GetPartsOnline.com‘s letterhead. I asked her for the correct fax number, just to doublecheck, and she gave me an Oregon number this time. Was she sure it shouldn’t be an Idaho number? After all, the package was still in Idaho. No, she was sure. He should fax it to an Oregon DHL center, because that’s where the package was headed. Suspicious, I called the GetPartsOnline.com guy again, and told him to fax it to both numbers, just to cover all bases. He was OK with that, and we parted telephonic company for good.
So the next day, after late morning had come and gone without a delivery, I checked the package’s routing number on DHL’s web site, which listed the package’s current location as Caldwell, Idaho. Still. And, better yet, it had been marked as “return to sender.” Apparently my first hasty phone call from the previous evening had been a critical mistake; their promise to reverse the “return to sender” request had not come to fruition. At least they hadn’t actually shipped it back to the sender yet — just marked it that way. Yet another call to DHL, and I finally got a guy who called the Idaho DHL center and asked them to head down the hall, grab my package, and personally set it aside for delivery to the correct address. I asked him about the whole fax fiasco. Apparently, the operator who told me the GetPartsOnline.com guy needed to send his fax to Oregon had no idea what she was talking about. As I suspected. They promised me an early-morning Wednesday delivery. I told them they needed to refund part, or perhaps all, of the delivery cost. He agreed, but pointed out that any refund would go to GetPartsOnline.com. If I wanted to see a piece of the refund, I’d have to get it from them.
They finally pulled through with the Wednesday delivery, and I received my new emergency power supply three business days late. All was well, finally, more or less. Justin was arriving for a two-week visit later that night, so things were looking up. When it was time to meet Justin at the airport, I left home for about an hour, and when I came home again, my laptop screen had gone black, and displayed a command-line error message: “IDE #0 Error”. I couldn’t revive the thing, and took it to the very Toshiba service center I had almost patronized so recently. When they finally got back to me on Tuesday, they told me the hard drive had crashed beyond their ability resuscitate (which had nothing to do with the power supply fiasco), and if I wanted my data I’d need to send it to a data recovery specialist, which can run a couple thousand dollars, apparently. I’ll probably end up doing that, eventually — it was bad enough losing data integral to my freelance jobs, but there was some priceless stuff on there I hadn’t gotten around to backing up, as well. Including a bajillion adorable photos of my niece and nephews. So if anybody knows of a cheap, reliable data recovery specialist, don’t keep it to yourself.
So I spent a hundred bucks on a computer part that’s now useless to me. The kicker? I still haven’t gotten a shipping refund, or even a partial refund, from GetPartsOnline.com. They’re not even answering my email. Lame.
