So my Dell Latitude D620 screen died yesterday. The first thing I did was look through my emails where I could find the order information hoping that I had indeed taken out the 3 or 4 year warranty rather than the default one year. Thankfully that was the case.
I logged onto Dell Ireland support chat and started describing my problem to an agent there. At one point, she recommended that I needed another power adapter. WTF? Her final diagnosis was that I had a memory card problem. It was obvious she was just going through some script and at the end, the solution was obvious, send an engineer to where I was working. However, when I informed her that I was working in Switzerland, she told me that she could not organise an engineer from Ireland. I would have to call Dell Switzerland myself.
After trying to logon to chat with the Dell Switzerland support site, I decided to call the help line. After going through the many options to get to Latitude support, I got a guy on the line who was able to speak English. What was impressive about his approach was that he was didn’t follow a script. He quickly looked through the chat log of the interaction that I had with Dell Ireland and disagreed with the diagnosis. I did a couple of different tests and he seemed to be going through possible causes of the problem in his head. It seemed that I was listening to a technical Dr. House going through symptoms in his head and trying to work out a diagnosis. Finally, he said that he would send a technician on Thursday to physically look at the notebook. Here’s hoping my normal laptop is back tomorrow.