maple’s.fortunes
there is no central destination
3 & 1/2 Months Later…
Remember this? Yeah, fun times eh? Well, I put in a warranty claim and it was accepted and I was told to ship it to Seagate’s warranty department. Unlike other tech companies I’ve had to deal with, I had to pay for the shipping. They didn’t send out a box, and they sure didn’t pay for it. It cost me $50 to Fed Ex that piece of crap to them. And I couldn’t just send it regular mail because they said that it had to have insurance and a tracking number (which is fine, because I wanted that too). Plus, they had all these stupid packing guidelines, like it had to be in an ESD bag, which is an electrostatic discharge bag. I was not to happy about that. I mean, it’s not like I just happen to have one of those lying around. It isn’t even necessary since the drive is an external, so it should already be protected from static. If it was internal drive then I would understand, but it wasn’t. After talking to a customer service rep over their website chat thing, I decided to just ship it in its original packaging. The guy said that would be okay. Well, I get it shipped off and I see that they received it on October 15th, 2007 thanks to my Fed Ex tracking number. I didn’t expect it to take very long.
A day or so after I knew they had received it, I checked on their website to see what it’s status was. I wasn’t expecting it to be shipping or anything, but I sure didn’t expect what I saw. My order was somehow canceled. So they had my stupid Maxtor One Touch III 300 GB hard drive and my order got canceled. Right. I phoned them and was told that after a certain amount of time if they do not receive the drive they cancel the order. They guy said he would reopen it and hopefully the problem would resolve itself. Yeah, that didn’t happen.
I kept checking the website and it still said they hadn’t received it. I was getting pretty fed up at this point. After a few weeks I phoned back and told the customer service rep my story. He asked for my tracking number and then went to check out the situation. He came back and acknowledged from the tracking number that they had received it. He said that he would elevate the importance of the issue and that it should be resolved in a couple of days. Well, it didn’t. I phoned back and had to retell my whole story. By now they had had my hard drive for a month and there had been no action. It still said they had not received it.
The guy I talked to this time, again asked for my tracking number. He went away and came back only to tell me basically the same thing the last guy said. He said that it had been transfered to another department and they were waiting from a response from that department. A couple of hours later the customer service rep phones me to tell me that the tracking number I gave him was invalid. I reconfirmed the tracking number and he still said it was invalid. I was looking at the Fed Ex tracking page as I was on the phone with him, so I knew that it wasn’t. As it turns out, he somehow got Canada Post out of Fed Ex. After we got that sorted out, he said it would be like a week or two.
It is now two months later and I still haven’t received my drive. The website still says they haven’t got it yet, and it is once again canceled. I phone them again. I get to go through the song and dance once again. This guy tells me to phone back in a few days and hopefully by that time it will be resolved. Well, it was right around Christmas, so I couldn’t phone in a couple of days. When I finally get around to it, it is now January and they have had my drive for three months. By now I have phoned them at least 5 times and I would have thought that my story would have been in the file for this return. Was it? No. I had to retell it to the guy. I had to give him my tracking number again. No wonder nothing happened, they didn’t ever seem to record anything. It was like I had never phoned.
I told this guy my whole story and how I had phoned in numerous times before and how unhappy I was. He said that the tracking number checks out and that they did receive it and that he would re-prioritize it. The next day I checked the website and finally it said something different. No longer did it say open or canceled, it said “In process”. Last Friday I received a shipping notice from Seagate. They had finally shipped a replacement. I got it yesterday and it has been three and a half months since they received it.
This has been the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had. It far exceeds that of Xbox’s in terms of crappiness. It makes me so mad to think that something that should have taken a couple weeks tops took three and a half months. What really made it annoying was that when ever I phoned Seagate I had to re-explain everything. You would think that the first time I contacted them they would have added all that information into the RMA report, but apparently not.
I realized as I was taking photos for this article that they sent me a 500 GB drive instead of the 300 GB version that I sent them. I guess that is their way of compensating for how long this took. I’ll take it, but I’m still not very happy about this whole situation.
In the time that I have been without this hard drive, I have purchased two other small external drives. Now with the 500 GB drive I have over 1 TB of storage at home and a 1 TB server. I don’t think I’ll be running out of space any time soon.
2 Responses to “3 & 1/2 Months Later…”
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January 29th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
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January 29th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Glad you finally got your hard drive back.