Dell is on fire... not in a good way...

        Dell’s service quality is spiraling from bad to worse. I bought one of those uber high-end water-cooled dell desktops about 24 months ago. Now having bought dell gear in the past I know that it never makes it to 3 years without a serious hardware failure, so I do the smart thing and I get the 3 year next day on-site service.
       As expected I had multiple failures of the hardware in the last month with the onboard network card failing, USB flaking out, and finally one of the hard drives dying. I call dell to open a support ticket and I’m told,

“We can’t offer support this week, we are upgrading our support system.”

WTF?!? Multiple calls, online chat with support rep, bitter complaints about how I have a next day support contract and I’m finally able to track down someone agrees to open a ticket for me. Halfway through it becomes apparent that they are really just taking notes on paper and are going to open a ticket at some time in the future. (3 Days later and I still haven’t gotten the ticket email yet)
       But get this, once the ticket is opened they tell me it’ll still be at least two days before the tech will get the hardware and then he will call to schedule a time to come out. In no way does that qualify to me as next day on site support. I’m sure if I look in my contract there is probably a lot of hedges about availability of parts, etc. But, it’s just a bad experience. At a minimum I feel it’s false advertising.
      It’s kinda too bad really. I had been thinking of buying some more gear recently from Dell, cause they have good prices, but knowing the life time of the kit, and seeing the kind of service you get I think its not nearly as good a deal as it looks on paper. The reason apple seems to be winning these days all boils down to high quality gear and good support.

Update: Four days later I get a call from the tech,  he wants to know if he can drop by.  A hour later I have a new motherboard and a new drive.    So all in all, while I didn't get the speedy service I expected, the problem did get solved.  To be entirely fair if you go back 10 years ago I would have either had to ship the thing off or been completely our of warrant/servicing, so I don't really have a right to complain.