**UPDATE** It’s Christmas Eve and I’m borrowing Jon’s MacBook. HP had one of their people get in touch with me today and he listened to my complaints. He put in a request for the payment for the keyboard to be put back in my account and promised to follow up on all the shipping and repair stuff himself. I found it amusing that the escalation case manager I talked to was located in Toronto — Canadians would be the right people to outsource this stuff to as they’re usually so nice.

**UPDATE** After I pasted the link to this post on various HP forums, their Facebook page, my Facebook page, and their Twitter, someone took notice and got in touch with me via email.

I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that they can not only fix my laptop situation but also get me my money back for the keyboard.

To the powers who are at HP:

I think we need a separation. It’s not you, it’s me. Oh wait… it’s totally you.

My precious sweetling decided to remove keys from my laptop last Sunday so I went onto the HP Parts store and ordered a new one, paying for expedited shipping so it would come during this past week while Daniel was at school so I didn’t have him try to “help” me install it.

It hadn’t arrived by Tuesday afternoon so I called y’all up since my order number did not work on your website. Your people told me that it hadn’t shipped yet… which was interesting because I paid for expedited shipping, not “ship whenever you darn please” shipping. You offered to refund my shipping 4 business days after it arrived. After listening to me grumble, you told me to call the next day for tracking information. When I called the next day, you told me that it was backordered and wouldn’t be shipped out until January 15th and that whoever I talked to the day before should have told me that.

…

I was less than happy and made this known. I called up Customer Service to complain about this and the customer service rep in India informed me that my laptop was under warranty and that if I wanted to mail it in, they could replace the keyboard and the other problems that have cropped up over the last two years. By the way, my laptop is less than two years old and I’ve had to replace the keyboard three times (two of them were from Daniel but one of them is on you), I had to replace the hard drive last year, the moulding has broken so there is masking tape on it to keep me from cutting myself, the fan is malfunctioning, and my webcam is dead. Did I mention that this is a laptop that is LESS THAN TWO YEARS OLD?!?!?!?!? I also use this laptop for everything including the work I do as a copy editor. I grumblingly agreed to mail it in; and to your credit, you actually sent me the packing material in a timely fashion.

I went online to cancel the order for the keyboard which you told me wouldn’t be charged to my credit card until it shipped and discovered that you lied to me about that and took it out of my PayPal account. Given that you weren’t planning to send me the keyboard any time soon, I filed a dispute with PayPal which you have yet to answer.

Two days pass and a strange person enters my backyard and puts a small box on my back porch. Apparently, someone in your warehouse in Tennessee decided to slap a shipping label on it and send it to me… without instructions or a packing slip. I spent about 2 hours today getting bounced between the the HP Parts store and Customer Service who finally told me just to include the keyboard in the packing material and they’d install it when the laptop went in for maintenance. One problem: if I send the keyboard in with my laptop, I’m paying $80 for what should be a free fix under warranty. I told the the HP Parts store this and the supervisor I talked to informed me that I had screwed up by ordering the keyboard myself instead of calling Customer Service and paying for the privilege of being told that it wasn’t under warranty and would need to order a new one. I could return it for my money back but I’d have to call the post-shipment department which wouldn’t be open until Monday… when my laptop was supposed to be picked up by Fed Ex. They’d email me a shipping label which again would be unhelpful because MY FREAKING LAPTOP WOULD BE IN TRANSIT!!!!!!!!!!! When I objected and told them that I resented paying $80 for the privilege of using my warranty, the person replied that they weren’t in it for my money — they were interested in my business.

…

Yeah… I don’t know exactly where your company screwed up though I’m guessing it was when Carly Fiorina took over and outsourced everything to China and India. It might also be because Meg Whitman is now the CEO and she’s pretty much in it solely for the money. All I know is that if you actually cared about my business, you would not be bouncing me between Mumbai and Costa Rica for two hours and having people give me five different answers. I’m from Silicon Valley and I have family friends who worked for HP when I was growing up and I believe in the company… or at least I used to until now.

I didn’t want to play the “I’m an important person and you need to bow to my every whim” card because I know that I hated when people tried to play that card when I worked retail. However, I am a blogger and I have the power to broadcast this across the Internet and potentially impact the purchasing decisions of many people. This entire experience has made me incredibly reluctant to recommend your products and to give you my business ever again when I need to replace this laptop or my printer. I am not happy about this — everything else I’ve bought from you has been excellent or at least functional and I really love the printer/scanner/copier of yours that I bought last spring. However, my laptop has been a piece of junk and I’m honestly ashamed to admit that I patronized your company.

So… you need to seriously do something about your customer service. You have most likely lost this customer and you stand to lose many more when other people read about my experience. I’m willing to update this entry and add any overtures you make toward fixing my situation but I’m only going to do it if I see some real change.

In the mean time, I’m off to make some plans for how I’m going to get stuff done while you have my laptop for two weeks.