The story thus far: when our just slightly out of warranty computer died, Dell first of all refused to fix it, then said they would, then reneged on the deal. In short, first they followed the letter of the warranty. Then they would give us a one time break. Then they denied what they just said. All this came to us from Isaiah Babu of Dell’s Executive Customer Support Team, but no doubt reflected the vagaries and whims of his bosses and ultimately the $16,000,000,000 man, staunch Republican CEO Michael Dell.
I did not take the Babu/Dell double cross lightly, and wrote a furious blog in protest.
So what happened? The same Mr. Babu wrote me a short email in which he thanked me no less than three times—after I had just worked him over—and promised to fix the computer. Indeed, it was fixed in record time, Fed Exed back to us, and is working fine.
The reason we have called this new section of the blog, Standing Up for Yourself, is simple: you have to do it, as no one else will. Left to their own devices, the ever growing number of billionaires in the world, like Michael Dell, will simply take everything they can get their hands on, without a thought to the jobs lost to outsourcing, the damage to ordinary people trying to make a living with a computer who suddenly face uncaring “support” jerry rigged a continent away—these billionaires stomp on regular customers in the belief there will always be more suckers …
One has to shout to make these people hear—but as I showed, shout loud enough and they might finally do what they should have done in the first place: do a little customer service. So Dell coughed up $200 to fix my computer. Had they done it the first time, they would have had a grateful and loyal customer. Doing it now just makes me glad it’s over.
But what of our friend Babu? He holds four opinions in two weeks:
1.Company man: Can’t fix it ever if one hour past warranty
2.Nice guy, will fix it one time.
3.Nasty double crosser: hey, I don’t care what I said, we’re not fixing it!
4.Craven tool, thanking the person who smacked him down.
All I could think of was As Wikipedia puts it well, “Doublethink requires its true practitioners to hold contradictory and self-nullifying beliefs simultaneously.”
Exactly what Babu did, presumably at the behest of his superiors in the corporate culture. In short, to maintain your corporate job, one must nullify your own reasoning mind.
And that is too high a price to pay for a paycheck.
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