Dell, my home county’s (Forsyth County, NC) new big employer (and recipient of a rather generous incentive package from North Carolina and Forsyth County) ticked off Jeff Jarvis who happens to be one of the more prominent bloggers in the  U.S. Here’s his rant:

Dell lies. Dell sucks

: I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-year, in-home service.

The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.

I’m having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: overheats, network doesn’t work, maxes out on CPU usage. It’s a lemon.

But what really irks me is that they say if they sent someone to my
home — which I paid for — he wouldn’t have the parts, so I might as
well just send the machine in and lose it for 7-10 days — plus the
time going through this crap. So I have this new machine and paid for
them to F***** FIX IT IN MY HOUSE and they don’t and I lose it for two
weeks.

Publisher’s note: I added the asterisks after the "F" in the post.  I don’t have a problem with the F-bomb, but my mom and kids sometimes read this thing.

Me-thinks the Dell PR people, not to mention their customer service folks, might want to get in front of this one.

Update: Apparently Dell hasn’t done anything to quell Jeff’s rage.  Here’s some links to some follow-up posts with excerpts:

• Jeff’s second post: But that’s what bothers me most: I bought that warranty, the top-of-the-line, most expensive warranty that warrants to send someone to my home to repair my machine.

  Except that’s a big fat Dell lie. The person they would send to my
  home would not have the parts (or, according to some of my commenters,
  the expertise, training, and intelligence) to repair that machine.

  Smells like fraud to me.

  Smells like a class-action suit to some of my commenters and emailers.

  Calling Mr. Spitzer. Calling Mr. Spitzer.

• In his anger Jeff then posted a piece with a link to what he eventually discovered was a hoax about Dell installing keyloggers ont heir machine’s at the behest of Homeland Security.  Jeff’s commenters quickly set him straight, but you can see the effect of Dell’s action (or inaction) on a normally rational and very influential person.  Here’s the post in question:

  Dell hell, continued: Laptop 51

  : I have no way to verify whether this is true, but a commenter in my Dell laments says he found a spy in his laptop.

  It didn’t take two seconds to smoke the hoax: see the comments. I
  posted this on the train; found the nearest starbucks; came online and
  there was the fact-checking mob. Thanks, guys. Of course, something
  smelled funny but I’m glad you found the cheese. You’re better men than
  I, Gungas.

Where are the Dell damage-control/PR folks?

And now this on 6/24/05:

Dell sucks. Dell lies. Continued and continued and…

: I just got my Dell back. They replaced the system board, the CPU, the
memory, the palmrest assembly, the keyboard, and the wireless NIC.

Within a half hour, it’s proving not to work. The heat, according to
an ap my son found, is up to 154 degrees. The machine is overheating.
The fan is on high. And the CPU is running at 100 percent. Dell sucks.
Dell lies.

Dell makes lemons. No lemonade.

Dell sucks.