It took an hour and a half on the phone with Dell's customer support to get the configuration I wanted with the deals I wanted. It was more confusing than a DAZ sale and that's saying a lot.

I had a $800 purchase set up and went to the shopping cart and applied the available coupon and got the $200 off. The shopping cart showed that the free shipping offer was being applied, but the total didn't. I went to Dell's online chat and they couldn't fix the problem and said that a sales rep would call. None did, so I had to call them.

Before calling, I remembered that, since my office has all Dell computers, I'm eligible for an employee discount. I went to that side of the site and configured everything as I did before. This time, the free shipping was properly applied. The $200 coupon did not apply. I make the phone call and find out that the employee discount invalidates other sale offers. I told the sales rep that it's a pretty lousy discount when a person off the street can get a couple hundred dollars off better deal. That's when the rep decided to try to build me a better deal. She built a configuration that she said matches my needs. Luckily, I asked her to send me the configuration before saying, "Yes." It turned out that she missed two of the items I had upgraded. She put those in and I noticed that she didn't put in the 800 MHz RAM instead of the default 667 MHz DIMMs. She couldn't match the price I had and had to put me on hold while she talked to a supervisor. The one nice thing is that she was feeling competitive and didn't want to give up and let me get a better price through the standard system.

While the sales rep was busy, I rebuilt the non-employee discount system again and saved it in the shopping cart. She didn't believe that I could get the price I was getting there and thought that I was getting a different discount than the one the coupon was providing. The discussion was hitting a point where she didn't believe what I was telling her and this helped provide the proof that she was lacking. I also saved a copy of the original configuration I wanted and the one she built me and used a document comparison in Word to see what the differences were. The configurations Dell sends in a quote are a laundry list of what looked like 50 items and that's not easy to eyeball one-to-one to see where the differences are. I didn't want to provide my credit card number without being sure that I was getting what I wanted.

The sales rep got back online and configured everything correctly and provided a comparable price (a few dollars more) to the original estimate I had and gave me a slightly bigger hard drive (320 Gb vs. 250) and a more expensive surge protector than in the original order. If I ever have to go through that again, I'll buy from another company. I got a slightly better deal with the employee program, but it probably wasn't worth the time and trouble to get it. I wasted too much time trying to get the best deal. I even tried reconfiguring a different model, that had $100 off up front and that one would not take the $200 off coupon, so would have been $100 more. It was just like trying to figure out all the premutations of a DAZ sale where some sales deals work together and others cancel each other out so that a sale could be more expensive than without a sale. Luckily, I rarely ever need tech support. If sales are this convoluted, I'd hate to think about how bad their support is.

The computer is supposed to be delivered the end of the month. Hopefully, all will be well. If not, Acadia can do the "I told you so!" happy dance.

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