Since November 2022, I have been in a hopeless back-and-forth with Dell, the worst company in the USA.
In February 2022, I ordered a Dell laptop, paying in full with a Visa card. The package was stolen upon delivery. I immediately contacted Dell and completed a police report as Dell required, which I forwarded to their shipment investigation email. I disputed the transaction with my card issuer. The next day, the issuing bank notified me that they were “research[ing]” the dispute, & that “[t]he merchant(s) can provide information supporting the charge(s) during the next two billing periods. If they do not respond during that period, our credit(s) will remain on your account.” After more than a week of contentious emails, a replacement arrived in late February.
Under Visa Rules 1.11 & 11, it was Dell's responsibility as the merchant to demonstrate that the chargeback should be reversed. At the point of this successful shipment, Dell had both 1) the responsibility & 2) all the information they needed to contest the chargeback with Visa by showing that a resolution was being reached; they had 2 months to do so. They did not. So, in April 2022, my card issuer resolved the dispute & let the chargeback stand due to Dell's inaction.
The first notice I received of “a balance” was 7 months later, in November 2022. I responded promptly, believing this a double charge. I explained the no-cost replacement. The Dell employee attached nothing to this initial demand, and it was written so poorly (replete with grammatical, punctuation, and capitalization errors as well as suspicious highlighting and font changes, see below) that I initially believed it to be a phishing attempt. Dell did not respond until March 2023, at which point I realized that Dell never did anything to challenge the dispute, as was their responsibility as the merchant. From that point onward, Dell has harrassed me nonstop via (extremely unprofessional) email & phone calls during my work hours (which I made repeatedly clear to them), demanding that I pay by PayPal, wire transfer (???), mailed check, or reading my CC information aloud on the phone, treating me like a thief, neither responding nor, it seems, reading my responses. They refuse to provide an official Dell.com link to its credit card flow, the method I used for my original purchase, and moreover, they refused to apologize for the absurdity of claiming that the communications screencapped below were intended and expected to be taken seriously.
I wrote via USPS certified mail to Dell to 1) verify that this charge was legitimate (at this point, I frankly still wasn’t sure, still confused and skeeved out by the Accounts Receivable emails) and 2) to lodge my dissatisfaction at the quality of Dell’s communications up until that point (which I just think is sooooo rich, given Dell’s own feeble little anti-phishing warnings) and received a condescending, evasive non-response from an in-house attorney. Separately, I submitted a BBB complaint in an attempt to get an escalated response/to get my emails read; “Cecibeth Stanford” of Executive Escalations Management wrote back rudely. Both confirmed the account was legitimately Dell’s, despite all appearances, so I paid via PayPal and reiterated for the third or three hundredth time (naturally, to no response):
I documented all interactions extensively and provided them to Dell, to no avail.
Look, I too can hear my screeching, increasingly dramatic derangement; it’s a fool who wants to make a corporation admit fault in even terms of etiquette. But it’s the unapologetic, insistent, unveiled accusation of theft and wrongdoing that I can’t stand, the sneering tone, the “listen, silly little girl” and “you thought you got away with this” of it all. This whole experience has made me do and say truly unwell things like screaming “YOU FECKLESS DISHONORABLE RATS” at my email app in the middle of the street. Like . . . okay. I know that I need to just let this go, but I cannot stand that they, or anyone, would get away with such deliberate lies, while they were the party that was negligent in the first place. I had zero aversion to paying; I 1) was suspicious of the demand emails’ legitimacy, 2) was opposed to the limited methods insisted upon, and 3) remain bewildered by Dell’s insulting unprofessionalism as a matter of principle. Look at those emails!!!! I don’t blame the individuals involved per se, but they are being directed to act unacceptably. I can’t let it go.
I’m sorry to be such a brutally insufferable pedant all the time, so hair-sensitive to honor and politeness and the correctness of things, but I have unfortunately always been this way. I have a whole folder of letters and bulletins I wrote in complaint on various occasions in high school, meticulously explaining why my chemistry teacher, one of my counselors (not Ms. Arrington, angel), the child-hating tyrant of an assistant principal who hated me because I 1) couldn’t hide that I knew she was dull and 2) refused to genuflect and heel and beg her for permission to exist, etc. were wrong. My high school diary effectively was a running Federalist Papers-esque pamphlet series wherein I would indignantly spell out why something was improper and needed to be fixed or apologized for. My skirt was inappropriate? No, it was literally ankle-length, and if you could see through it only because you shined a light between my legs, then whose fault is that? I switched lab partners without permission? No, please refer to your explicit instructions, attached. (My high school’s Twitter blocked me for pointing out that whoever was running the account was posting erratically and ungrammatically about God and online shoe retailers.) I used to despair that adults just have too much contempt for young people but have amended that to a despair that most people approach the whole world with contempt, perfectly content to be lazy, imprecise, and wrong. Too many people just lack both shame and pride.
The ultimate fool here, of course, is me. Despite knowing all the above about what makes me unhappiest, I’ve locked myself into a profession that consists mostly of the fiction that being right matters, where you write and research and no one seems to read or think about your work anyway, and it makes little difference how hard you argue the facts or the law, or if both and good sense are actually all on your side. “As briefed,” “as discussed,” “as briefed extensively” — I happen to be currently in a despondent moment where none of it appears to matter. You can submit near a thousand pages of briefing and evidence, opposing DHS counsel will submit hardly twenty, if that, of handwaved last-minute assertions, and no degree of diligence or sheer correctness will matter. You destroy your eyes and back working nights and weekends for $58,000 a year, plus all your law school loans, which is less than half of what the government’s attorney “arguing” against your client made nearly a decade years ago, and you see far better and smarter attorneys lose cases for reasons so beyond their control, and think at yourself, God, you useless piece of garbage, why are you even alive, what can you do for anyone? Looming all the while, of course, are the stakes for your clients. It is so excruciatingly horrible to lose where losing means someone will be deported and likely tortured or killed. It’s not about me, and I can put my blinkers on and be constructive and focused when I’m working, but I’m also still a person who can feel guilt, fear, and inadequacy. I know this is what deportation defense is sometimes, I don’t need to be preached at, I know.
I’m simply saying that right now I already feel bereft of hope or purpose or agency or the ability to effect any good. This has been a hard month for many reasons. But logging off my work computer and logging on to my personal device to find a new snide snotty little finger-pointing last-straw jab from maliciously obtuse Dell HQ illiterates makes me want to take a baseball bat to all property in sight and then my own skull. It fills me with sour bile and rage. Assuming that Dell has no intention of Scrooge-esque repentence and redemption, I hope it falls to complete ruin. I want to see little scavenger fish picking at its bleached, crumbling bones. Being right and believing it worth trying to be excellent has never saved or served me; neither will ever be rewarded on this Earth, and I will simply never learn. I’m happy and fine, why do you ask?