My 9-month old Gateway M675X notebook quit on me one Monday morning about a month ago, 2 hours after I did my weekly backups.
I was as grateful for the timing as I was exasperated at the occurrence. It took me a day or so to rebuild all my applications and restore my backups onto my old Gateway desktop… ‘coulda been a lot worse, I kept telling myself.
Gateway online-chat tech support assured me that I’d have it back within 5-7 business days. I then got conflicting reports (“You’ll have it on the day after Labor Day”) (“It’s at the service center but it’s not been looked at yet”) so I phoned them. “You should have been told that we’re experiencing a 4-week backlog at our repair center. No, we can’t expedite anything, even though you were incorrectly informed.”
Arrrgggghhh.
I had shipped the laptop to the Dallas branch of Teleplan, a 3rd party repair center. It just so happens that my son Collin Wigley lives in Dallas. When I checked Mapquest for the distance between his apartment and Teleplan — 12 miles!
It was a long shot but I asked him to pay them a visit with the hope that a little face-to-face intervention could expedite things.
He was warmly greeted at the Teleplan reception area and then introduced to Ashley Kimvoraphanh, Teleplan’s Sr. Program Coordinator for Gateway. In minutes, she located my laptop, assured him she’d have it looked at ASAP, and then — get this — gave him her direct phone line and told him to call her the next day for an update.
I was ecstatic, of course. I’d expected they’d give him the “I’m sorry but we don’t deal directly with customers. You’ll have to talk to Gateway support.”
A day later I got the bad news… the CPU was fried and they didn’t have a replacement in stock. No ETA on it, either. I asked Gateway Tech Support if they could ship me a new PC instead and was told this wasn’t possible, as my warranty was only for labor and parts replacement.
And then two days later, my Maxtor secondary hard drive on my desktop machine gradually died… the drive where I’d been storing most of my recent work. I’d been operating on the stupid assumption that another major meltdown would never happen so close together so I didn’t bother with backups. Big mistake. Maxtor offered to replace the drive for free but it was up to me to do any data recovery. When I checked around, the going price is $100 to just evaluate it, then a minimum of $600 more to actually recover it. Oy.
When another week went by and still no ETA on my laptop, I phoned Ashley at Teleplan and asked her if she could plead my case to Gateway for a replacement machine. A day later I got a call from Tom at Gateway telling me that they’d decided to ship me a new one, and that Teleplan would ship me back my old one for me to swap the hard drives. Yaaaaay!
The next morning, I got my old laptop from Teleplan as promised. But it’s been 3 days now and I can’t get a response from Tom at Gateway as to when my new one might arrive.
I guess it’s time to contact Ashley again. And meanwhile, plot a whole new backup strategy.
Why is it that all my clients laugh when I tell them I’ve been in computer hell for the last month?
9.23 update: I finally got an email order confirmation from Gateway. (It wouldn’t surprise me if Ashley was the one who got them to respond.) The replacement won’t be here till October 11th. AAARRRGGGHHH!
9.24 PM update: I got this note from Ashley’s boss today. Talk about responsiveness. These Teleplan folks should offer some training to the Gateway folks.
Griff,
It’s great to hear that your experience with Teleplan has been positive. We work very hard to ensure that our contact with our customers’ customers (the end user community) is positive, but feedback is sparadic and usually negative. As you might expect, Ashley frequently gets high marks from her customers, (I wish I could clone her).
Sorry that we haven’t been able to do more more you on the repair side. We are really good at that too, but we are dealing with some major shortages of various commodities coming from the far east right now and it has impacted service. If you don’t hear from Gateway soon on your replacement, Bryan can give you a head’s up when we should get the CPU’s back in stock. (We might have an ETA on them). If so, we might be able to get your unit in and out of our shop in one day. That could put you back in service pretty quick. Let us know and thanks for the feedback.
Best regards,
Ted Hawkins
Mgr. Repair Programs
Teleplan Dallas
