that's an hour of my life I'll never get back

There's one part of my job that I dread doing more than anything else, and thankfully I don't have to do it too often: making calls to customer service departments. Honestly, I don't know how some of them get off still calling it "customer service" since the only service they provide is that of pissing me off to the point of screaming into the telephone and imagining the person on the other line being mauled to death by a pack of hungry chihuahuas. But as bad as customer service can be, it gets so much worse when the call center has been off-shored to India. No one who has gotten to the point where they've submitted to defeat and decided to make the dreaded call in the first place is in the right frame of mind to then be put through the task of hunting down the actual phone number on the "user-friendly" website (past pop up offers to live-chat with "Terry" or "Lisa" when you know it's more like "Ambuja" or "Preeti")and tempting suggestions that you wade through the user forums where other saps like yourself may have had their issue resolved by others with nothing better to do than surf said forums. Once you do find the phone number, you have to enter a series of other numbers and information about yourself which for some reason they are incapable of keeping for the use of each successive operator they end up shuttling you through. If by some miracle you get a live human on the other end, you have to explain using symbols and grunts what the problem seems to be, and what should take two minutes to explain ends up taking 20. Then you either get disconnected or told that you're calling the wrong department and to please call the other service line, where you start the process anew.

Today I spent over an hour on the phone with Dell who, through several frustrating and resolution-free conversations over the past couple of months, have led me to the conclusion that not only will I never be purchasing another Dell product again, but I may also light my current one on fire and send it still smoldering FedEx Overnight to Delhi. I had to explain what I was trying to accomplish THREE times to THREE different people, each explanation taking over ten minutes to complete, and none getting me closer to a resolution. In the end, I wound up in the Software Support department, a place where they waste your time listening to you describe the issue for 15 minutes, only to transfer you to a manager who will ask you to describe the issue and will then try to sell you a "guaranteed resolution" for $89. When you finally buckle and agree to a now lowered price (because you flat out refused the higher one), they take your credit card information and then leave you for five full minutes, only to come back and say that resolution they guaranteed is unfortunately impossible. Commence beating phone on table. I went through all this, and even stayed on the line while the latest person I was talking to transferred me to another technician who would be able to confirm they couldn't help me. Once he did that, I held once more so I could be transferred yet again to someone who would assure me that my credit card wouldn't be charged since they couldn't resolve my issue. Except, instead of ending up with someone familiar to my case, I wound up in the Sales Department, while someone asked how he could help me with my purchase. After an hour and ten minutes, for some reason this was my breaking point, and I hung up. And two minutes later got a call back from the Dell Call Back Department, expressing their regrets that we were accidentally disconnected.

I am really dreading the call I will have to make when the next credit card statement comes in.