On the plain meaning of "three days"

Whenever your host decides to write a post with a title stating "on the plain meaning of X", it's usually safe to assume that the target is someone who managed to miss it anyway. In this case, the recipient of SC's ire is the Hewlett-Packard customer service department. Although this post is being typed on SC's just-returned laptop, he is quite unhappy with the "service" experience he was put through, and as it is a Very Bad Thing to annoy people who have blogs and enjoy sharing, HP will hopefully come to regret their behaviors.

Our saga begins in December of last year. Just two months after purchasing a new Pavilion dv9000 laptop (a then-top-of-the-line notebook) featuring HP's new "Imprint" finish (so named because any handling of it whatsoever leaves an Imprint), the plastic bezel surrounding the screen began to separate right at the point where a hole has been molded in for suckers who wish to use Kensington locks. (Yes, they deter the most casual of thieves, but not anyone who is actually putting some thought into stealing a laptop.) Since the plastic was only a bit separated, it didn't seem worth sending in for repair, as that would mean going without the computer for a week. And nobody whose job starts with "computational" wants to be caught dead without their computer.

Unfortunately, once a seam was open, the bezel continued to separate, and eventually the plastic began cracking, taking one of the hinges with it, and making the lid almost impossible to open and close. Finally, it reached a point where the internal wiring was clearly exposed, and this made for an intolerable situation -- the laptop needed to be repaired.

Like Dell, HP has outsourced their customer service number to a call center in India. SC does not fault the Indian employees for the fact that they have great difficulty doing their jobs -- the phone connection can be somewhat noisy to begin with, the differences in accents are surely as hard on them as they are on the customers, and like any call center employee, they don't know anything beyond what's in their scripts. However, the fact that blame for the low quality of the experience does not rest with the call center employees does not make for a happy customer -- it merely redirects his frustration toward the brand more generally. In this case, specific issues that SC had with the call center were: 1) an inability to determine that his 6-month-old machine was under warranty, 2) a determination without examining the laptop that the damage was due to customer negligence and should be billed to SC, just as soon as they figured out what parts were broken, and 3) an insistence that it would be necessary to wipe my hard drive and "restore the system to initial functionality" despite the completely normal operation of the laptop.

In any event, after contacting HP on May 17th, your host received a box to ship the machine back to HP on May 22nd. This was a helpful reminder never to consider again for purchase any laptop which does not come with the option of onsite service. Since the call center told SC that he would receive the machine back in "3 business days" after sending it to them, and the third day would have been Memorial Day, it seemed to be a good plan to wait until the following Tuesday to ship the package back, with the expectation of getting it back on Friday or the following Monday.

We now interrupt this post to print the relevant text of the "HP Care Pack" statement of turn-around time:

Turn-around time for this service will be three (3) HP business days for eligible geographic locations...Turn-around time is measured in elapsed days from the time the product is received during business hours at the HP-designated Repair Center...until the repaired product is shipped to the Customer...If the product is received at the HP designated Repair Center after 5:00 pm local time, the three-day turn-around time starts with the next business day.

Alas, it wasn't close. According to FedEx, HP received the laptop bright and early on Wednesday morning -- 8:38 AM. SC would have expected this to mean that the laptop should have been shipped out on Friday, as that's three days. Monday would have been a tolerable interpretation of their contract, but not a welcome one. So imagine how upset your host was to receive an e-mail confirming receipt -- and pledging that it would be sent back on Wednesday, June 6th. Ahem. Coworkers suggested that this was done in order to make SC feel that they exceeded expectations if they delivered earlier, but they set an expectation for a time which was well past their contractual deadline, and this is unacceptable. So is the fact that even their "exceeded expectation" is an unambiguous failure.

So then this morning, your host checked his e-mail (thanks to Mrs. SC for the use of her laptop while this was ongoing) and learned that the computer was scheduled for delivery a day "early" (or two days late, depending on your interpretation), meaning that he had better stay home and wait for the shipment -- and that the day was preemptively ruined. Unfortunately, shipping firms such as FedEx and UPS are firmly committed to the Heisenberg Delivery Principle, which involves a tradeoff in measurement of your position versus their delivery window -- if you go out at all, it becomes impossible to predict when they will try to deliver to your home (although it will almost certainly be while you're out), but if you stay home to make sure you get your package, they will guaranteedly arrive just minutes before the endpoint of their committed delivery window. Wanting his laptop back, your host opted to stay home, and FedEx duly held up their end of the bargain.

So now SC has his laptop back, but has lost a good week of productivity to HP, and been rewarded with much aggravation besides. Fortunately, either the service technicians in Fremont, CA, are possessed of a better attitude than the call center employees, or they were at least appropriately unnerved by the pointed note that SC packed in with the laptop, noting the totally unnecessary nature of wiping his hard drive, as it came back in possession of as many operating systems as had been loaded on it when it left. There is no way in which the eight days of SC's separation from his laptop computer can be construed as "three", though, and for that HP richly deserves a public rebuke.

(Colophon: This post composed on a recently delivered HP Pavilion dv9000 notebook.)