Man, Dell really has dissatisfied this customer. I’ve documented some of this on Twitter, but the gist is that I bought a refurb display and it arrived missing a cable.

The packaging didn’t include any bill of materials, nor a phone number to call if anything was missing. Every time I phoned one of Dell’s many 800 numbers, I would be shunted around by representatives with poor English skills. (Sorry, that’s a stereotype. Specifically, it’s a stereotype invented to describe Dell’s phone support.)

At one point, the phone rep told me that a DVI cable wasn’t included in the purchase price. I told him it explicitly said on their web site that it was. He went away for awhile to check it himself, then came back on to say that nevertheless, I couldn’t have one. I asked to speak to his manager. He went away again for a few minutes, then came back on to say I could have one after all. It wasn’t clear if they’d ship it in time for me to have it before Thanksgiving.

In the past 12 months, I’ve bought a laptop from Dell and a desktop system, besides this monitor. I’m in charge of purchasing a new computer for the secretary at church later this month. I expect that to cost between $500 and $800 depending on whether we buy any preloaded software from the hardware vendor.

Let’s assume the phone support is free. (And with quality like that, it should be.) I priced DVI cables on Amazon and it looks like they run anywhere from $3 up. So Dell can probably get them for 50 cents. Or a quarter. But my time is free, so they wasted 47 minutes of it last night and another half hour today.

Where do you suppose I won’t buy my next computer?