My Newfound Hate for Lenovo

I hate Lenovo. A brief history is in order.

12/1/2006
Oh happy day! Life is great! After doing a lot of investigating and reading, I decided I’d finally go ahead and order me a new X60 ThinkPad with the SXGA screen. I was given an estimated ship date of 12/15. After I put it through I thought perhaps I’d have to get two day shipping just in case so I could get it before I have to leave for Christmas. So I called and they had to completely redo my order. Not sure why, but there you have it. In any case, I was now all set with two-day shipping.

12/8/2006
I get another email. Why? It didn’t say… so I went to look at the web site. My ship date was now the 19th. This was getting close to when I had to fly home for Christmas. Now my two day shipping wouldn’t help me unless it shipped early. So I waited.

12/18/2006
It hadn’t shipped so I called to get the address changed to get it shipped to where I was going to be for Christmas.

12/19/2006
Theoretical ship day. I went to the site to make sure my address was now my new ship-to address. It wasn’t. I wasn’t pleased. But then I looked up and my ship date was 2/6/2007!! I should note that I did not get an email this time. So now they’ve not only not changed my ship-to address, but they’ve moved my ship date out over a month, all without informing me in any way. Very annoying.

So I called and asked what was up. I spoke to one guy that didn’t seem to be able to tell me much of anything and he could write a note to the shipping department and someone would contact me in a business day. I asked why can’t he tell me right now what’s backordered. He didn’t have a good answer. In the end I had to run to a meeting so I just hung up a bit rudely (and who can blame me at this point).

After my meeting I called back and got someone who had more of a clue. I told him the whole story about how the only reason I got two day shipping was to get it before I left for vacation, but since my ship date was moved out to crazyland, I would hardly need it anymore. I asked him to remove the two day shipping and change my ship-to address back to my bill-to address. He confirmed he would do both things. I also asked what the holdup was as the current estimated ship time on the site was 1-3 weeks (same as when I ordered. I should also mention that I had checked the week previous just to see what their lead time was and it was 1-5 days). He said the ones with the SXGA screens were all on backorder. Why did they not know that three weeks ago when I ordered? I asked if the new date was any more real than the last one. He said yeah. I highly doubt it.

12/21/2006
I get two emails from them (Thanks for your order. Yay.) and again I have to go to the site to guess what’s different. Seems my ship date slipped out again to 2/9 and my ship-to address was changed… to the exact address I asked that it NOT be sent to any longer. So I had to call these idiots again to get my address changed. Then I decided to write to the email address in the emails they send me to complain about how this order has been handled.

To date, noone from shipping ever contacted me within that ‘one business day’ window that one guy told me. Nor has anyone answered my complaint email. Of course, the latter could just be because of the time of year.

But at the end of the day, they told me 1-3 weeks originally now it’s like 2 months from my order date. And they have bungled my address changes twice now. They really need to get their act together. I am sitting here wondering why I haven’t already cancelled. It’s just too bad they get to treat their individual customers like crap. I bet their corporate customers aren’t having these sorts of issues.

Screw you Lenovo.

Vista on MacBook Pro

Yeah, that’s right. I am actually writing this blog entry in IE7 running on Vista on my MacBook Pro. I’m running under BootCamp. I had also created a Vista environment in Parallels, but seeing that I only have 1G of RAM it was a little pokey at times considering I was trying to compile code I have to say though that Parallels runs very well otherwise. Very respectable. But I wanted Aero glass and window effects and I wasn’t getting that there. So off to BootCamp I went.

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Verdict: Blackberry Pearl Rocks

After using my Pearl for the last few days, I have to say that I love this phone to death. Finally, after all this time I found a phone I like and works well for all the things I use it for. I even forgive the not-quite-as-good-looking-as-the-tmobile-one looks. And the Cingular theme has really grown on me.

I cancelled my Verizon account tonight in celebration. I know how to party.

The Blackberry Saga Continues

I received my new T-Mobile Blackberry Pearl two days ago. I unpacked it and admired its beauty, turned it on, and went through the setup. Setup went without a hitch. Set up my email account on the Blackberry service with zero issues. The out of box experience (OOBE) was second to none, in my opinion. Everything worked great. I played with the phone for at least an hour, tweaking settings, exploring the features. I fell in love with it. It’s certainly the best phone I’ve owned, particularly in that form factor. Surely nothing would dampen my excitement and enthusiasm for finally finding a great phone!

Until I went to work the next day. (more…)

New Kitchen

For those that know me, I’ve been engaged in redoing our kitchen for a while now. It was supposed to be something we did right after we got the house. Fast-forward to 3 years later and it’s now finally done. It is awesome, make no mistake. It’s the kind of kitchen that makes me say “F*#$ YEAH!” every time I go into it. Or look at it. Or think about it. Well, you get the idea. (more…)

Blackberry Pearl On Its Way

I am sadly still in search for the perfect cell phone that does it all well. After getting my Treo a while back I stopped using it. Because the software was bad? No. Because of the Verizon coverage issues? No. As silly as it sounds (more…)