Thread by @SteveCollinsYJI

Today I need to tell a story about how a company, @dell, is mistreating the little journalism charity my wife & I created 25 years and making it difficult for @YJInow to serve its students around the globe.
Take note, @DellCares. 1/

2/ Let’s start with the April 17 purchase, for $967, of a new @dell computer to replace one relied on by @YJInow that had suddenly died. That’s never fun.
(By the way, you can see YJI's website at youthjournalism.org.)

3/ Getting a new computer is always a mix of anticipation & dread because new & fast is great, but it sure does take a lot of work to get everything set up.
Still, it's always nice once it's racing along!

4/ When the new @Dell machine arrived, we set it up, turned it on and got going – ever so briefly.
Then it made this clunking sound and the monitor went dead. That happened over & over & over. No idea why.
I confess that we are basically clueless re computer hardware.

5/ Oh, well, I thought. I guess the monitor is shot, too. So we got a new one. That didn’t help.
For a little time, though, the computer kept going clunk, clunk, clunk... but the monitor stayed on.
And we had things to do.

6/ By May 7, after about a week of it, & after checking it with yet another monitor, we recognized for sure that something was wrong with the PC we had just got from @Dell. So I phoned the company, explained the problem & wasted more time troubleshooting with its support staff.

7/ Since we had an in-office repair as part of our purchase, we figured they’d come fix it. But, no, @Dell insisted we had to mail the PC back to the company for the repair. I later learned it thought the motherboard might be no good & supposedly nobody local could fix that.

8/ We were told to send the PC via @FedEx and that we’d have it back in 7 to 10 days. Gulp. That’s a heap of time for a 24/7 charity we operate as volunteers. @Dell refused to send us a replacement computer, the simplest solution.

9/ Because we actually need the computer, we eyed the calendar & figured out the best looming 10-day period to go without. It’s important to note that without the PC, our ability to work with scores of aspiring young journalists is extremely limited.

10/ So @Dell said it would send us a box to pack the PC up & mail it off to them. A few days later, a box arrived.
It was the wrong size & contained packing materials that didn’t actually fit the PC it had just sent us a couple of weeks earlier.

11/ We managed to use a mix of original packaging & the new one to arrange the PC, stripped of all the new content we’d had to load over the course of many hours, & make it safe to ship. Early on May 23, we took it to the local @FedEx shop with the @Dell-supplied label affixed.

12/ We were unhappy customers at that point because we had bought a costly PC that wasn’t working & that @Dell had done nothing to repair on premises, as promised. But we rolled with it because, hey, that’s life. We wished the PC well and mailed it away.

13/ By a simple process called math, we figured that 10 days from May 23 would bring us to Monday, June 3 to get the computer back, at the outside, the previous Thursday if lucky. We’re realists, so we eyed the Monday date to be up and running again.

14/ It wasn’t until May 29, six days after we mailed the PC, that @Dell received it. God only know where it was during that time. We think @Dell must have paid only to put it on a truck or maybe a pushcart instead of shipping it overnight.

15/ On May 30, somebody finally looked at the computer. It turned out, I was told later, that the motherboard was fine. What it needed, as some of you no doubt guessed, was a new video card. At least that’s something @Dell could just pop in & ship the PC right back to us, right?

16/ Oops.
@Dell says it didn’t have any of the video cards in stock & was waiting on a shipment. By Monday, June 3, it said, it might be able to tell us when the card might arrive.

17/ We said: No.
You promised us, @Dell, to have our computer back in our hands within 10 days. Either fix it & mail it to us so we have it Monday or just refund our purchase so we can go buy one ourselves.
Or just send us a new one & do whatever you want with the first.

18/ Frankly, we never dreamed that @Dell would tell a little nonprofit run by volunteers working with young journalists to go pound sand.
But that’s what it did.

19/ Instead of fixing the computer, sending us a replacement or refunding our money, it promised to have someone from the “escalation team” call on Monday.
THE ESCALATION TEAM! Doesn’t that just say it all, really? They have a whole team to deal with people they've screwed?

20/ It’s important to note that we were always polite & always friendly. We know the poor saps we’re dealing are just employees doing what they’re told as best they can. They don’t set the policy at @Dell. They just deal with it.

21/ Next up, we said on social media that we had a problem with @Dell that we hoped to resolve without having to complain online because, really, we’re interested in having a working computer not going to war with a gigantic company.
It changed nothing, though they answered us.

22/ The bottom line is pretty simple: We bought a spiffy new computer from @Dell on April 17. As of June 3, we still won’t have an operating computer & the company we bought it from doesn’t care.
Not one bit.

23/ We could perhaps live with that except that we have eager, idealistic, talented students who rely on us. And we are stymied because #DellDoesNotCare.
Just today one of our students from Singapore met another in Iran. That is super cool. Too bad we can't really post about it.

24/ @Dell sent @YJInow a bum computer. It failed to fix it at our office, as promised. It sent us the wrong packaging material. It missed its own promised deadline to repair & return the PC.
In sum, it has proven unable to provide us with a working computer after 7 weeks!

25/ We’d like to know how an empty desk offers @YJInow “the power to do more.” And the notion that Dell is “Purely You” is, well, laughable.
Call me stupid if you want. But I still have hope.
@Dell, do the right thing. Get us a computer.
Now.