What the hell, dell!
So, I lost my previous rants about dell, and the place just wasn’t the same without at least something.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I *want* to like them. Being able to order 40 servers from one place, have them all the same, along with a rack that they all fit in, is great. Superb compared to the hoops I have to jump through to get the right racks normally.
However..
I had a lot of problems with their 1850 line — DOA servers, massively increased power usage, high in-user failure rate, the HORRIBLE access to the ports on the back of the server, no cable management arm, the list goes on..
So I tried talking to my sales rep, telling them that I was having problems with their servers, and that I really didn’t want to spend hours on the phone with tech support per server, especially when they can find nothing wrong. He seemed interested, took the service tags, etc. Nothing really came of that.
Then there was a new sales rep in town. He wanted to meet me, but I never called him back. Then the western director of sales or something was in town, he wanted to meet me. I told the local sales rep that I wasn’t really interested, because I had so many problems with the servers as it was. He said that meeting with the higher-up guy would help sort things out, let them know what was wrong, etc.
So, I met with them, they were nice enough, I went over our problems and our server purchasing schedule for the next 9-12 months, they were interested in my problem (and pretty much admitted that I was right on the money with several of my complaints), and seemed ready to take action to get further business. They came over to the server room and saw the pile of dead dells, and took all the service tags.
Soon after I got a lot of calls with a caller ID of 1-800-289-3355. That’s the number they have for all outgoing sales calls I think. I never answer it. First it was the outside sales guy introducing himself. Then the server specialist. Then the parts and printers guy. Then the microsoft licensing guy. The last one is particularly great since I said multiple times that we were a unix only shop.
That was the end of it. I haven’t heard anything. The servers are all still just as dead. No follow up calls or emails, nothing. It’s kind of nice to not have them bugging me, but I’d sort of like to get the 10s of thousands of dollars of servers fixed.
Oh well, more business for silicon mechanics I guess.
