Una verdad simulada

Finally, on Friday, two desktops that I have been trying to order from Dell got installed. These are your run-of-the-mill desktops: Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Disk, etc.; simple pieces of machine that cost less than Rs. 40K apiece. Here is the saga (with approximate timelines).

• I got the quotation from Dell on August 16, 2008 and promptly placed my order thereafter.
• Around September 3rd, I got a letter from the computer purchase committee that there were some issues with Dell products not meeting the specifications.
• In the next week or so, I personally met some of the faculty who had issues (yes, real issues) with Dell.
• It turned out that the issue was with Dell laptops and I could proceed with my desktop order. In the mean time, I got the quotation validity extended until 18th October
• I placed another request with our stores around 1st October (perhaps earlier; it was before Gandhi Jayanti).
• The stores finally released the purchase order (PO) on November 4th
• About a week later the Dell representative confirmed that the PO was received. A month later, when I didn’t hear anything, I contacted the Dell representative. He informed me that they cannot honour the order because the quotation had already expired and the Rupee had depreciated by over 10% in the ten weeks since the quotation was first released. I reminded him that he could have told this to me right in November, thus saving a month of our time. [This was around the time my grandmom fell very ill, and died… so I couldn’t follow up on the order.]
• He finally sent another quotation on December 18th. Our stores section again sat on the order for a month. The quotation expired again and I got it renewed on January 21st.
• Our institute, placed another order in response to the older quotation on January 21st. Luckily for me, the new quotation was received at the right time that Dell could process the order.
• On Feb 10th, the sales manager informed me that the representative in charge of my order quit his job, and left causing some problems in their system. Of course this was all verbal and I don’t have written documents to corroborate this statement. He asked me (this part via email) to send him a copy of the PO, so that he could process my order without further delay.
• I sent that promptly, although it is not my business to do this for him. A few days later, he introduced me to another representative who will handle our case.
• The Dell sales manager did not forward my email to the representative for almost two weeks. On Feb 23rd, I forwarded the PO again to the Dell representative.
• In the mean time, we placed an order of 60 computers with Dell for upgrading our undergraduate computer lab. Believe it or not, in spite of all this trouble, Dell is still no worse than most other vendors.
• When I spoke to them on March 19th, the order was still not placed due to technical issues. Essentially, being a government body, IIT-M does not have to pay Customs and Excise duty and there was some problem with that.
• Finally the computers that I have been trying to order since September arrived in Chennai Airport on 1st April. The 60 desktops ordered in early March arrived a day earlier, on 31st March!
• Thats not all. The Custom’s officer refused to honour the tax exemption certificate on some technical pretext. Since the Director is from our department, I requested our department head to look into the matter. I don’t know what happened then; the sixty desktops for the department got delivered on April 15th.

Finally, my desktops, the process for which I started on August 16th, 2008 were delivered in my office on April 20th 2009 and were installed on April 24th. This is the first post written using this desktop.

Tags: General //