Sidetracked Charley

Where Fedex seems to think I live I was standing outside with some visitors to my studio yesterday afternoon at 2:00 when I watched the Fedex truck first go one way on down State Hwy 434 and then a few minutes later the other way. Yes, I can see the main highway from my house. And traffic on the road can see me. I have been known to wave at passerbys. I do not live in a cliff dwelling in the wilderness. The urgent package from HP,that I had paid to be delivered on second day, (mind you not next day because I know better) was not delivered. Why am I not surprised? Had it been UPS it would have been here. I groan when service or order departments tell me it is coming Fedex. I beg for alternatives. I have been known to whine when the product like a fix for my computer is sorely needed. So last night after my visitors from Florida (who found the studio) left I got on the internet on my laptop and tracked the Fedex package. It is in Eagle Nest. Why Eagle Nest? There is no Fedex fac...

After having put Fedex and HP down in a couple blogs I thought I ought to say something good about a company. After the external hard drive crashed last October and then the computer service tech I took it to erased the hard drive on my desktop I signed up for the Carbonite Cloud . It is an ethernet back up service that takes the worry out of backup. I am an artist and I admit for losing complete track of time about backing up my computers. Or loading photos into my FlickR account. With the cloud I just have to be on line and anything new I post is backed up. And I can be on any device to access the cloud and pluck down information. I first used it when I had forgotten to download a file from my desktop to my laptop before taking off to a fair. Then again when the desktop failed yet again. I bought a new computer and upon receipt of it could immediately get the backupped data from the cloud and put it on the new one. Now my desktop (still under warranty with HP) has failed and jus...

Ernestine In the old days before technology ran wild you had a chance of talking to a real receptionist or a real operator. Note I did not say human. Ma Bell, the mega telephone company we insisted on breaking up, gave all their operators and service personnel a list of questions and responses from which they could not vary. One of Ernestine's lines on the old Laugh In comedy show was, "Is this the person to whom I am speaking?" I was reminded of Lily Tomlin that made Ernestine famous yesterday in a series of telephone calls to HP and Fedex concerning the undelivered package to ship my broken computer back in. Both have a set list of questions and responses from which they are not allowed to vary regardless of how inappropriate the are.  "Your driver failed to deliver the chemo drug package this week and my husband has died." " We are sorry for your inconvenience." "The funeral is Wednesday." " We apologize for any inconveni...

I told HP on Sunday I wanted a shipping notification within 48 hours or I was canceling the replacement HP Pavilion order and getting a refund instead. And low and behold the HP Case Manager did indeed get a shipping notification to me. However, Fedex has yet to receive the HP desktop computer to ship. For a while this morning the Fedex tracking number provided me by HP even said it would get delivered today. Frankly I was leery of that one because it gave a ship date of the 11th and I didn't give them my ultimatum until the 12th. I must admit this was a rather clever ruse. Too bad they are not as clever at giving good customer service. Meanwhile someone is marketing is sending out e-mails saying I can still order a computer today and get it before the end of the year. Interesting since I have been told I would be very lucky to get the one I essentially ordered in November before the end of the year. Really HP get your script straight. Is this sort of game playing really das...

I would like to say HP is the Grinch that stole Christmas but I am not sure they are any worse or better than 99% of modern business. It all comes from Mexico or China with support teems in India or Texas (both have impossible accents) and CEO's in the United States that only care about the bottom line and not customer satisfaction. I am so sick of being asked to take on line customer satisfaction surveys (even my computer nerd that destroyed the original HP had one) that I tell them it is really simple just note unacceptable for everything you ask me to rate. It doesn't help that because I do a very base rate on Qwest (because basically they were the first firm this year that lied to me) it is costing me 3 cents a minute to be lied to by HP. You know when they say this call may be recorded to ensure customer satisfaction? Well, I am thinking of recording them on my end to compare the lies they tell. Supposedly they have an open file on a computer (might HP case managers u...

I all fairness let me first say I am not really neutral on computers right not. I have been dealing for over a month with a three year old HP desktop computer that a local nerd, in the business to save computers, killed after losing 3 years of data. Yes, I backed up, but to an external hard drive that failed. So I was forced to go shopping for a computer when I did not have the time nor the money. Nor quite frankly was I feeling warm and fuzzy about the boxes or the people that worked on them. But computer shopping I had to do. I am a small business and while I have a laptop for play I need the desktop for lots of year end business stuff and beginning of the new year submissions of art for fairs throughout 2011. HP had a cyber Monday sale that extended through the following Tuesday and I found a computer, that while not the one of my dreams, met my minimum requirements, fit my budget and would be delivered within a week. The HP Pavilion arrived on December 6th and I un...