Dante wrote that the gateway of hell read, "Abandon hope, ye who enter here." I think he was on musical hold with customer service at the time with someone who did not understand that if his pens were out being repaired, he could not make his living. Hence why he put it on the Gateway.
To recap, Elie sent the laptop, a vital tool in his business, in to the service department for a simple warranty repair a month ago. Gateway sent it back to where we lived two forwarding addresses before where we lived when we bought the laptop. The people who received the package in error returned it to Gateway, who has no idea where the laptop currently is located. Customer Service gave us every impression that a missing laptop report would be filed, they would make one last-ditch attempt at finding the computer, and if that failed, they would be shipping out a replacement ASAP to make it good. Yes, I hear you laughing from here. We all know where this is going. Turns out no one filed the paperwork to report the laptop missing. Now the soonest a replacement might possibly be sent out would be Thursday. Not that it matters. We have no intention of keeping whatever they send us back. We're passing this trouble off to a guy who is willing to buy the new laptop, even knowing how we came by it.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel. His name is Eric and he works for the CompUSA in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This guy is what customer service should be. Elie had reached the limits of how long he could effectively do his job without a laptop, so we crossed state lines to find an open store where we could get a Mac G4. Eric responded admirably to my strategy of looking like a little confused puppy in the general vicinity of the merchandise I want to buy, and he set us up with the new laptop and all the necessary software, plus throwing in a home networking router (free with rebates). He probably would have ordered us a pizza if he thought it would make us buy more. We're reserving ultimate judgment to see if Elie's business program will run on Virtual PC, but if it doesn't Eric has made sure we can return the whole bundle even though the return policy clearly states we cannot return opened software. We watched him put that paperwork in.
Live humans, 1. Phones, 0.
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