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Sep. 28th, 2006 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogPeople at work were pissing me the hell off today. We have nine people starting on Monday who ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
serinthia and I have to build laptops for. Four of them we only heard about on Wednesday. What the hell is wrong with people that they can't plan new hires more than four days out? Not to mention the one we got directly from a manager, circumventing our 'has to come from HR' procedure. I told her we needed HR notification and then one of the part time recruiters okayed it. I started the setup process only to find out that this is a contract person who needs a whole different process. Plus we're in violation of Sarbanes-Oxley controls if we set up third party users with accounts without the right paperwork. It's not like they don't know the damn procedure either.
I've been wrestling with HP's support department for over two months now trying to get three of our laptops repaired. That's been the customer service equivalent of a hundred-car freeway pileup in itself. Let me tell you a story.
Some time ago, I'd accumulated three laptops with broken screens on the shelves in the support room. Broken screens are 'accidental damage'- not covered under our extended warranty. They have to be shipped offsite and repaired, at our cost, at a service facility.
I called HP's service number and opened three separate tickets for these systems. I got three different case numbers, and shortly received three pre-paid shipping boxes to mail them in to the facility. Fine.
I wait. I wait some more. I keep getting cryptic little notes from the repair facility. Things like "We have received your hardware for case number xxxx. Additional notes: unknown." Finally, the next week, I get a phone call with some actual information. I got the cost of the repairs (about $400 a pop) and was informed that we needed to have a credit card or purchase order to bill against. Fine. I ask around about how to generate a PO. I don't know how to do that. I'm just help desk. I send PO requests for hardware or software to purchasing after making sure they're in the right format and I never see them again.
I find out that I have to open a ticket in our call tracking system (RTI), attach a filled out PO request form to it, and sent it to purchasing to have a PO generated. Fine. I create three tickets (each laptop repair has to be charged to the department that the short-bus rider who broke it belongs to, so I have to have three different cost centers; hence three POs), get my POs from them the next day, print them out, and fax them to the number I got from HP.
A few days later, I get a phone call from HP indicating that the repairs are on hold because there is an open billing problem with our company. I'm not in billing. I'm not even in purchasing. I just process POs. I don't know how to fix this. I called the HP service line back to find out more information. They sent me to billing. I talked to someone there who could only tell me that we had an open charge against us. I figured I'd wait to see if things resolved; maybe a check hadn't cleared or something. A few days later, I try calling HP to ask for the status of these tickets. Same story; our repairs are on hold due to an open bill. By this time it's the end of the week, and I come in to work next Monday to find three laptop shipping boxes waiting for me.
I open them up. Here are the three laptops I sent to HP. Included with them are helpful little notes with wording much like this: "We identified a problem with your laptop, but it was not necessary to replace any parts to resolve the issue." I opened them up; screens are still spiderwebbed. Maybe you can reconcile those two pieces of information, because I can't.
I call my manager. I explain that HP is refusing to repair our hardware because of a bill that we supposedly hadn't paid. She sends me a person in our accounts payable department. I talk to her, give her the number for HP's billing department that they gave me, and tell her what's going on. She says she'll look into it with them.
Near the end of the week, I find out from her that the account that HP claimed to her was unsettled was taken care of. My company sent them a check some time ago. The check had even been cashed. HP applied it to the wrong place, hence the three still-broken laptops sitting on the shelf next to me.
Ok, that's finally all taken care of; I steel myself against the voices that are telling me to give up now and keep my sanity and I try it again: I call up HP. Rather than provide my whole long, sad story, I start from scratch. "I have three laptops with broken screens. I need to have boxes shipped to me to send them to the repair facility."
'Can't do that.' Is the answer. They need a PO to cover the non-refundable examination fee before they can even ship boxes to me. 'We've never had to do that before. Is that new?' I ask. I am assured that it has always, but always been done that way and that the people I've talked to who just sent me boxes without a PO were wrong. I need to cough up an $89 fee per unit before they'll even piss on my laptops; perhaps most of the companies they deal with are as weaselly as they are. They did open up three more tickets for me though to await the creation of my POs.
So I start creating three more separate PO request tickets. I carefully plug in the cost center, department name, HP case number, and cost into the little fields of our Word form three more times. I finish up the tickets and send them off to purchasing to await PO generation.
I get them back the next day and call up HPs service line again. I wait on the phone the typical ten minutes or so and finally get a rep, this time one who's almost entirely understandable; bonus! I give him the HP case numbers and the serial numbers of the three laptops. I tell him that I have a PO to cover them and ask if I should fax it to him. No, he just needs the number. So I read him the PO number. He says he'll put that info into the three tickets and get boxes shipped out to me. About time!
I wait a couple days. A pre-paid FedEx shipping box shows up. Note that I said a box. I wait another day. No more boxes are presenting themselves. I call HP's service line. I explain that I have three open tickets for laptops to be shipped to the repair facility and was expecting three boxes, but only got one. I ask for the status of the other two boxes. You might expect that the tech would offer to actually check the status of the other two tickets before giving them up as a lost cause and opening three brand new case numbers. You would be wrong.
"I don't need to create three more POs for these new tickets do I?" (And the answer had bloody well better be no.) No they can just put the PO number into the new tickets. *sigh* Ok, fine. I am now jotting side by side case numbers, serial numbers, and cost centers into a notepad document so that I can try to keep track of this tangled web of data. We go over each of the numbers in question together to make sure he has them right, and he assures me that boxes will be coming.
Sure enough, a couple days later, I get three boxes in the mail. Yes, for those doing the math, I now have one extra box. Despite the huge temptation to fill it with with the densest material readily available and ship it back to HP, I put it on the shelf, load the three laptops into the three new boxes, and take them with me to the FedEx store on the way home from work to mail them. Here we go again.
Of course I start getting the cryptic little notes that I've become so accustomed to from HP. "We've received your hardware. Additional notes: unknown." After a few days, I get a call from HP's billing department. Case number xyz has been determined to have a bad LCD. (No kidding!) The repair cost is foo. Okay, but I'm going to hold on and wait for the other two systems to be ready so I can take care of them all at once. (Our purchasing department, I found out after all this started, can put multiple cost centers on one PO, and I'm sure as hell not going to put together another three if I don't have to. That's fine, I'm told. I just have to have my PO in by the end of the week or they will return the laptop unrepaired. Ok, this is Monday. I have plenty of time.
While I'm on the line with billing, I ask about the requirement to have the $89 evaluation fee covered before they're willing to ship a box. "Oh no, that's not our policy. You can pay after the evaluation." Next time I get someone who tells me otherwise I'm going to resist the urge to grab his throat through the phone lines and throttle him, and instead ask to talk to a manager.
I wait another day. I get a call about the second laptop. Same deal, same total. Great! Maybe this is all going to work out after all! That afternoon, while I was away from my desk, I got another voice mail from the service center. This had to be the third one! The ordeal was finally ending!
No. The call was from someone at the service center who said that he was unable to determine what the problem was. I shook my head and picked up the phone. Once I got through to the voice mail at the number I had (amazingly enough a direct number), I won a hard-fought battle against leaving a message asking if they could send some of that awesome crack they've been smoking to us along with the laptops, and instead just noted that, hey, the screen is broken dude.
I can only assume that they decided to heed my message and actually crack the lid open to look at the screen, because two days later, today, I got a laptop shipping box back in the mail. I opened it in fear that I would find another unrepaired laptop, but much to my surprise, the unit was back and with a perfectly good LCD. Not only that, but as far as I can tell, we haven't been charged for it either. Heck; I won't say anything if you don't.
So today, I finally got the PO in hand for the modest sum of only $800 for just the two system repairs. I tried to fax it in to HP today on two different occasions. To add insult to injury, both times I got a busy signal.
Tomorrow, with luck, the saga will end, and I will finally have everything in the pipes to get my last two wayward computers on their way back to me. A nagging little voice tells me that it's not going to be that easy. Something else is going to go wrong. I suppose we can only wait and see....
serinthia and I have to build laptops for. Four of them we only heard about on Wednesday. What the hell is wrong with people that they can't plan new hires more than four days out? Not to mention the one we got directly from a manager, circumventing our 'has to come from HR' procedure. I told her we needed HR notification and then one of the part time recruiters okayed it. I started the setup process only to find out that this is a contract person who needs a whole different process. Plus we're in violation of Sarbanes-Oxley controls if we set up third party users with accounts without the right paperwork. It's not like they don't know the damn procedure either.I've been wrestling with HP's support department for over two months now trying to get three of our laptops repaired. That's been the customer service equivalent of a hundred-car freeway pileup in itself. Let me tell you a story.
Some time ago, I'd accumulated three laptops with broken screens on the shelves in the support room. Broken screens are 'accidental damage'- not covered under our extended warranty. They have to be shipped offsite and repaired, at our cost, at a service facility.
I called HP's service number and opened three separate tickets for these systems. I got three different case numbers, and shortly received three pre-paid shipping boxes to mail them in to the facility. Fine.
I wait. I wait some more. I keep getting cryptic little notes from the repair facility. Things like "We have received your hardware for case number xxxx. Additional notes: unknown." Finally, the next week, I get a phone call with some actual information. I got the cost of the repairs (about $400 a pop) and was informed that we needed to have a credit card or purchase order to bill against. Fine. I ask around about how to generate a PO. I don't know how to do that. I'm just help desk. I send PO requests for hardware or software to purchasing after making sure they're in the right format and I never see them again.
I find out that I have to open a ticket in our call tracking system (RTI), attach a filled out PO request form to it, and sent it to purchasing to have a PO generated. Fine. I create three tickets (each laptop repair has to be charged to the department that the short-bus rider who broke it belongs to, so I have to have three different cost centers; hence three POs), get my POs from them the next day, print them out, and fax them to the number I got from HP.
A few days later, I get a phone call from HP indicating that the repairs are on hold because there is an open billing problem with our company. I'm not in billing. I'm not even in purchasing. I just process POs. I don't know how to fix this. I called the HP service line back to find out more information. They sent me to billing. I talked to someone there who could only tell me that we had an open charge against us. I figured I'd wait to see if things resolved; maybe a check hadn't cleared or something. A few days later, I try calling HP to ask for the status of these tickets. Same story; our repairs are on hold due to an open bill. By this time it's the end of the week, and I come in to work next Monday to find three laptop shipping boxes waiting for me.
I open them up. Here are the three laptops I sent to HP. Included with them are helpful little notes with wording much like this: "We identified a problem with your laptop, but it was not necessary to replace any parts to resolve the issue." I opened them up; screens are still spiderwebbed. Maybe you can reconcile those two pieces of information, because I can't.
I call my manager. I explain that HP is refusing to repair our hardware because of a bill that we supposedly hadn't paid. She sends me a person in our accounts payable department. I talk to her, give her the number for HP's billing department that they gave me, and tell her what's going on. She says she'll look into it with them.
Near the end of the week, I find out from her that the account that HP claimed to her was unsettled was taken care of. My company sent them a check some time ago. The check had even been cashed. HP applied it to the wrong place, hence the three still-broken laptops sitting on the shelf next to me.
Ok, that's finally all taken care of; I steel myself against the voices that are telling me to give up now and keep my sanity and I try it again: I call up HP. Rather than provide my whole long, sad story, I start from scratch. "I have three laptops with broken screens. I need to have boxes shipped to me to send them to the repair facility."
'Can't do that.' Is the answer. They need a PO to cover the non-refundable examination fee before they can even ship boxes to me. 'We've never had to do that before. Is that new?' I ask. I am assured that it has always, but always been done that way and that the people I've talked to who just sent me boxes without a PO were wrong. I need to cough up an $89 fee per unit before they'll even piss on my laptops; perhaps most of the companies they deal with are as weaselly as they are. They did open up three more tickets for me though to await the creation of my POs.
So I start creating three more separate PO request tickets. I carefully plug in the cost center, department name, HP case number, and cost into the little fields of our Word form three more times. I finish up the tickets and send them off to purchasing to await PO generation.
I get them back the next day and call up HPs service line again. I wait on the phone the typical ten minutes or so and finally get a rep, this time one who's almost entirely understandable; bonus! I give him the HP case numbers and the serial numbers of the three laptops. I tell him that I have a PO to cover them and ask if I should fax it to him. No, he just needs the number. So I read him the PO number. He says he'll put that info into the three tickets and get boxes shipped out to me. About time!
I wait a couple days. A pre-paid FedEx shipping box shows up. Note that I said a box. I wait another day. No more boxes are presenting themselves. I call HP's service line. I explain that I have three open tickets for laptops to be shipped to the repair facility and was expecting three boxes, but only got one. I ask for the status of the other two boxes. You might expect that the tech would offer to actually check the status of the other two tickets before giving them up as a lost cause and opening three brand new case numbers. You would be wrong.
"I don't need to create three more POs for these new tickets do I?" (And the answer had bloody well better be no.) No they can just put the PO number into the new tickets. *sigh* Ok, fine. I am now jotting side by side case numbers, serial numbers, and cost centers into a notepad document so that I can try to keep track of this tangled web of data. We go over each of the numbers in question together to make sure he has them right, and he assures me that boxes will be coming.
Sure enough, a couple days later, I get three boxes in the mail. Yes, for those doing the math, I now have one extra box. Despite the huge temptation to fill it with with the densest material readily available and ship it back to HP, I put it on the shelf, load the three laptops into the three new boxes, and take them with me to the FedEx store on the way home from work to mail them. Here we go again.
Of course I start getting the cryptic little notes that I've become so accustomed to from HP. "We've received your hardware. Additional notes: unknown." After a few days, I get a call from HP's billing department. Case number xyz has been determined to have a bad LCD. (No kidding!) The repair cost is foo. Okay, but I'm going to hold on and wait for the other two systems to be ready so I can take care of them all at once. (Our purchasing department, I found out after all this started, can put multiple cost centers on one PO, and I'm sure as hell not going to put together another three if I don't have to. That's fine, I'm told. I just have to have my PO in by the end of the week or they will return the laptop unrepaired. Ok, this is Monday. I have plenty of time.
While I'm on the line with billing, I ask about the requirement to have the $89 evaluation fee covered before they're willing to ship a box. "Oh no, that's not our policy. You can pay after the evaluation." Next time I get someone who tells me otherwise I'm going to resist the urge to grab his throat through the phone lines and throttle him, and instead ask to talk to a manager.
I wait another day. I get a call about the second laptop. Same deal, same total. Great! Maybe this is all going to work out after all! That afternoon, while I was away from my desk, I got another voice mail from the service center. This had to be the third one! The ordeal was finally ending!
No. The call was from someone at the service center who said that he was unable to determine what the problem was. I shook my head and picked up the phone. Once I got through to the voice mail at the number I had (amazingly enough a direct number), I won a hard-fought battle against leaving a message asking if they could send some of that awesome crack they've been smoking to us along with the laptops, and instead just noted that, hey, the screen is broken dude.
I can only assume that they decided to heed my message and actually crack the lid open to look at the screen, because two days later, today, I got a laptop shipping box back in the mail. I opened it in fear that I would find another unrepaired laptop, but much to my surprise, the unit was back and with a perfectly good LCD. Not only that, but as far as I can tell, we haven't been charged for it either. Heck; I won't say anything if you don't.
So today, I finally got the PO in hand for the modest sum of only $800 for just the two system repairs. I tried to fax it in to HP today on two different occasions. To add insult to injury, both times I got a busy signal.
Tomorrow, with luck, the saga will end, and I will finally have everything in the pipes to get my last two wayward computers on their way back to me. A nagging little voice tells me that it's not going to be that easy. Something else is going to go wrong. I suppose we can only wait and see....
