I am going to find it difficult to express in words just how pissed off I am with Helwett Packard and their laughable customer service at the moment so excuse the rant type post.
I said in my blog yesterday that I feared something had gone awry with the delivery of the replacement hard drive and it now appears that my fears have been realised.
Yesterday I made contact with Arv (the guy who works for HP that apparently follows Twitter for #hewlettpackard tags) letting him know that though the boot disks had arrived, the replacement hard drive had not, suprising given that I was quoted 4 days for delivery of the drive and 10 for the disks. The drive was apparently being sent by UPS so I had asked for a tracking number so i could check on the progress myself. The reply was that he had made contact with the HP Spain team and someone would ring me. They didn’t.
Today I log on to Twitter on my iTouch and see a tweet from Arv saying that ‘all should be in the pipeline again, agent will contact you shortly’. The realisation that there was an issue frankly made my blood boil so I asked for information on what the issue was, the reply to which was that he didn’t have that level of detail but, someone would phone me.
It is now nearly 3pm and I have not received a phone call.
My guess is that the hard drive has not been sent, but no-one will tell me. In truth the situation has now reached a unbelieveably ridiculous level. I am sat on a campsite in Spain, waiting for a hard drive to arrive and I have no idea if it has even been sent to me. I am running up a bill with the campsite and have no idea when I will be able to leave. I don’t really want to leave before I have the replacement hard drive in my possession just in case it arrives and is sent back by the reception.
I am finding it difficult to put it into words just how bad my experience with Hewlett Packard customer service has been. The initial contact was all stock replies with some personalisation, the UK team were completely useless in dealing with my problem as I didn’t fit into one of their little boxes and couldn’t see a way to work outside of their normal procedures. Contact with Arv through Twitter seems as though it has had the best result so far but as soon as the issue is again left with a customer service centre the problems start again. I am finding the lack of contact from the HP Spain team extremely frustrating, leaving me in a situation where I don’t know what is going on or how long I am going to have to wait here for a delivery, each day costing me more money (currently nearing 200 Euro).
This has now been going on since the 21st January and in reality I am no further forward thanI was then. As the title says, it is a total and utter farce!
Hewlett Packard, you should be ashamed of yourselves, very ashamed!
/rant
The Blog of Steve Green 
Keep up the pressure, Steve – they’ll sort it eventually, just to shut you up. And Put Things In Writing calmly-but-firmly to the highest-up names in HP that you can find. This also gets things shifted.
And good luck, we’re all rooting for you!
Give ’em hell, Steve! This is really bad service.