The Haggler: Please Hold, for a Week or So

Then, the day after the column ran, came this:

“Dan Cochran, from the unresolved warranty department of VF, Eagle Creek’s parent company, called to say they would replace the backpack,” Ms. Jahrling wrote on Sept. 9. “He claimed he knew nothing of your column — rather unbelievable since it has been two months since I last heard from anyone connected to the company. But just in case, I e-mailed it to him.”

No doubt he was delighted.

But let us not dwell any longer on this puzzling corporate behavior. Not when there is so much corporate behavior that puzzles.

Q. My maddening Microsoft saga started when I installed the company’s Security Essentials software. I kept notes on the numerous calls, dead ends and accidental hang-ups I endured as I tried to get my computer to function post-installation.

Here is an account of just one day: Called Microsoft. Lengthy hold. Cut off. Called back. Rep asked to take control of my computer remotely and soon told me everything was fixed. Computer was quickly unusable. Called back. Hour on hold. Rep said someone from “advanced repair” would be in touch. Nothing. Called back. Rep said a “second-level technician” would take over. Hour on hold. Cut off.

It goes on, for days. But to summarize, I was bounced to many different agents, on many different continents, spent hours on hold, and still my computer doesn’t work.

Is this any way to treat a customer?

HAROLD ROSENBAUM

Brooklyn

A. It’s not, according to Microsoft.

“I feel personally terrible about this,” said Denise Rundle, general manager of Microsoft customer service and support.

Let’s get straight to what turns out to have been a major source of Mr. Rosenbaum’s troubles. Readers will think that the Haggler is kidding about this, because he is a born kidder.

But it’s true: according to Ms. Rundle, Microsoft had a hard time keeping track of Mr. Rosenbaum because he called from different phone numbers and provided the company’s customer service with more than one e-mail address.

Now, you would think that a company like Microsoft would have a system whereby customers are provided with an ID of some kind, so that no matter where they call from, or what e-mail address they provide, it’s crystal clear who they are.

And to be fair, Microsoft has such a system. But only for people who contact the company online. In those cases, you’re prompted to sign up for a Microsoft account. But not if you call in.

Sound a little crazy? Ms. Rundle agrees. She says that the company is in the midst of revamping its system so that in the very near future — by the end of this year — customers who call will end up with Microsoft accounts and, with those accounts, unique identifiers.

“We’re also working on simplifying the phone experience so that when customers call, there are not as many options,” she said. “Remember, we have 20,000 support agents and people call in for a vast number of reasons. So we have a lot of specialty queues, which means we wind up with too many choices. We’re now training our agents to have a broader understanding so that customers don’t get transferred as often.”

These sound like very good ideas. And consider the challenge facing Microsoft. It makes tablets, software, video games, and the list goes on. Devising a phone system that caters to the countless issues that could arise from any of these products — this is a job the Haggler does not want. Not that anyone has offered it to the Haggler. But just in case anyone at Microsoft was on the verge of making that offer, the Haggler would like to decline it in advance. Thank you for not asking.

But the issues faced by Mr. Rosenbaum, who is 90 and a retired judge, went beyond an overabundance of specialty queues and the lack of a Microsoft account. He says people kept trying to transfer him and failed. He says that people kept trying to fix his computer and failed.

“I’m surprised to hear that,” Ms. Rundle said. “We have really strong customer satisfaction measures.”

Certainly, once alerted by the Haggler, the company knows how to satisfy customers. A service rep at Microsoft — “Very pleasant man,” Mr. Rosenbaum said — called a few weeks ago and offered to buy him a new computer. By then, he’d already purchased a new PC, because the old one had ceased to function, so the company sent him a check for $725 in reimbursement. It also enrolled him in its premium technical support subscription, which the Haggler likes to imagine as a guy in a skinny tie who visits your house whenever you look quizzically at your computer.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

The Haggler: A Voucher Deal That Wasn’t So Sweet

Two weeks ago, she wrote this: “I wanted to let you know that the new refrigerator was delivered on Tuesday. And it sounds like a normal fridge! Also, I put a bag of lettuce toward the back of the fridge and it didn’t freeze.”

Progress, indeed. She thanked the Haggler. The Haggler thanks Whirlpool. And we’re off on a new adventure.

Q. In October 2011, I purchased a voucher through DailyCandy — an e-mail service for discount deals — for a pair of custom-made jeans that cost $85. The voucher was good until October of the following year.

In the spring of 2012, I tried to trade the voucher for the jeans and learned that the supplier, a company called Indi, had gone out of business. I contacted DailyCandy and was told to expect a refund in six to eight weeks.

In July, I called again, and was told there was a backlog. They apologized, and said a check would be sent in six to eight weeks.

In September, I was told a check would be sent in seven to 10 days.

In December, a woman named Deandra transferred me to a manager named Brian, who told me that the process for a refund had to go through an internal ticket system and be approved by the accounting department.

In January, I was informed that my account showed that a refund had been processed. Wrong. A woman said to call in two to six weeks if I hadn’t received a check.

There were three more calls in March, and several promises to “escalate” the matter. And another apology.

I am losing hope that I will ever see my money. Maybe you can help.

BARBARA HARRINGTON

Hightstown, N.J.

A. The DailyCandy Web site posts no news media contact number or e-mail address. So the Haggler opened a Twitter account and posted a cry for help. “Hey DailyCandy: trying to reach you about an unhappy customer. Would you be kind enough to get in touch with me? Pretty please?”

The Haggler’s first and so far only tweet. And a total flop. Many companies scan the Twittersphere for mentions, both positive and negative, but DailyCandy is apparently not one of them.

As it happens, though, the company is based here in New York City, in SoHo. So a few weeks ago, the Haggler just dropped by. It’s a chic little operation, or looked so from the reception area, where the Haggler waited until a guy who had clearly stepped off the set of “Gossip Girl” came by and said a public relations rep was on her way. That was Kimberly Soward, who said a vice president for communications would be in touch. The Haggler gave her his number and headed for the elevator.

Soon the Haggler was on the phone with Lenore Moritz.

“Ultimately, this customer fell through the cracks,” she said.

But where exactly were the cracks she had fallen through? Ms. Moritz said that DailyCandy, which is part of NBCUniversal, uses a third party to execute orders, a company called Group Commerce. It turns out that Group Commerce is based about two blocks from DailyCandy. An e-mail sent there eventually led to a phone call with the company’s C.E.O., Jonty Kelt.

“We handle e-commerce for a lot of brands,” said Mr. Kelt, who is a native of New Zealand and has that country’s disarming accent. Everyone from New Zealand sounds hearty and pleasant, for some reason.

While Group Commerce handles millions of dollars’ worth of orders, Mr. Kelt went on, it actually hires a third party to process refunds. That’s right. DailyCandy outsources its orders to Group Commerce and Group Commerce outsources refunds to 24-7 Intouch, a company based in Winnipeg, Canada.

It’s getting easier to see how someone could fall through the cracks, isn’t it?

The Haggler was going to call 24-7 Intouch, but Mr. Kelt said that the error was in his shop.

“Our finance department, when they cut a check, they have to mark a refund as processed,” he said. “It appears that in this case it was marked as processed, and upon further investigation it was discovered that the check was never created or banked.”

HOW did that happen? How did Ms. Harrington’s check appear to have been sent when it wasn’t?

Mr. Kelt said he had looked into the matter, and he couldn’t be definitive about what exactly had led to this error. He added that Ms. Harrington’s experience was “an outlier” and that Group Commerce and 24-7 Intouch handled thousands of refunds every year without any hitches.

Well, that’s nice. And, of course, any system can break down now and then. What’s troubling here is that Group Commerce couldn’t rectify a mistake after more than a full year of inquiries by a customer. People kept politely taking her calls and whatever error was made in her case could not be undone.

The Haggler sees this over and over: Customer service that can’t handle exceptions, even exceptions that are the result of internal boo-boos. Mr. Kelt called this set of events “regrettable.” If the Haggler were in his shoes, he would have gone a little further and contacted Ms. Harrington to apologize.

Mr. Kelt didn’t. But Group Commerce did send a refund.

“Pull out the noisemakers and let’s party!” Ms. Harrington wrote two weeks ago, about a year and a half after her refund campaign began. “A check was in my mailbox tonight.”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

The Haggler: Another Look at a Hard Sell on Extras at Staples Stores

IT’S been an eventful few months for Natasja Shah, a manager at a Staples store whom readers met in this space in September.

You may recall that she described the pressure that sales associates at Staples, the office supply chain, are under to sell warranties and accessories, particularly on computers. For motivation, close tabs are kept on the amount of extras and service plans sold for each and every computer. The goal is to sell an average of $200 worth of add-ons per machine, and a sales rep who can’t achieve that goal, Ms. Shah said, is at risk of termination.

This explained why customers reported some strange, seemingly anti-capitalist behavior at Staples stores: employees refusing to sell computers to customers who decline service plans. It’s a brushoff that Ms. Shah said was known among employees as “walking the customer,” because consumers are essentially shooed out the door empty-handed.

The day the column was published, Sept. 9, Ms. Shah sent a nine-page e-mail to the Staples national director of human resources, Sandra Kruel-Anderson, outlining this and a number of other practices she said she had seen, and found troubling, at the store where she works in Fountain Valley, Calif. This was her third attempt to get some attention in the executive suites.

According to Ms. Shah, she had described “walking the customer” to her regional human resource manager, and nothing came of it. In early August, she sent a complaint, identical to the one e-mailed on Sept. 9, to Demos Parneros, the Staples president of North American retail. She didn’t hear back. Her third effort got a reaction, which is not surprising. By then, she’d demonstrated a willingness to share her thoughts with others. Like the Haggler.

One afternoon in October, the Haggler visited Ms. Shah at her apartment in this suburb in Orange County, to find out what has happened since. She was at home because, soon after her Sept. 9 e-mail landed in human resources, she heard from a rep in that office, who suggested a paid leave while the company conducted an investigation. That investigation turned out to include a three-hour phone conversation during which Ms. Shah and the rep went over the complaint, line by line.

(Ms. Shah says that she has since filed for workers’ compensation for stress-related health issues and that her last Staples paycheck was in late October.)

“Right off the bat, she told me that Staples has been good to her and that she loves her job and she didn’t know why I was so upset,” recalled Ms. Shah, 39, who was born in Trinidad. “I said, ‘However you feel about your work has nothing to do with what we are discussing today.’ It was a little distressing.”

The alarming part, Ms. Shah said, was that the rep seemed to glide right over some of the more egregious ethical breaches depicted in the complaint — among them, that Staples employees are urged to sell warranties on items already covered by manufacturers.

A Staples spokeswoman, Carrie McElwee, said the company does not comment on personnel communications.

Ms. Shah had told the Haggler about the warranty issue, but it wasn’t mentioned in the September column — the whole “walking the customer” thing seemed meaty enough. But afterward, several current and former Staples employees got in touch — and when the Haggler asked if they sold redundant warranties, they said yes. The tactic, they continued, is actively encouraged by management and is often the only way to remain in good graces.

“Epson has a sticker that they put on the floor of the store, about how they’ve got the best warranty in the business,” said one former manager, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. “You’re supposed to stand on the sticker. And if they ask about the manufacturer’s warranty” — which is also described on the box — “you’re supposed to say that Epson is in the business of making money. Staples is in the business of taking care of you. And that you’ll have to ship the product back to Epson and Epson might reject the claim.”

In fact, according to this former manager, the Epson warranty is excellent, but he said it was common practice to tell customers that “it’s worth spending extra money for the peace of a mind of a real warranty.”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

The Haggler: Radio Shack and the Power of the Crowd

Trying an end-around, the Haggler posted a direct request in the column to Dorvin Lively, the company’s interim C.E.O., asking him to get in touch. To ensure that Mr. Lively got the message, the Haggler included the company’s media relations e-mail address and urged readers to send notes, too.

Well, many did. Exactly how many is unclear, as the Haggler is guessing that the 200 people who copied him in e-mails to Radio Shack is some fraction of the total. Suffice to say, it was a deluge, and it started about three minutes after the column was posted on Saturday night, gained momentum on Sunday and Monday and continued, in tapered-off numbers, for days.

It was an outpouring that gave the Haggler the kind of brief head rush that must be commonplace for megalomaniacs. Fear the Haggler, all ye recalcitrant corporations! For the Haggler Hordes stand ready at their keyboards and, given the signal, they shall unleash a torrent of highly articulate and deeply empathic missives that ye do not want clogging up thine Internet server.

“If I were you, Radio Shack, I’d respond to the Haggler P.D.Q.,” wrote Deborah Lopez, capturing the tone of a typical letter. “In the meantime, I think I’ll keep walking past your store and not stop in. Good luck.”

“If you won’t even respond to The New York Times’s Haggler,” Len Coris asked, “why should I think you would respond to me about a problem or an issue?”

“Bad Radio Shack,” wrote another reader, addressing the company as if it were a wayward Chihuahua. “Bad!”

Needless to say, this pig pile of indignity put Radio Shack in a far chattier mood. A spokeswoman, Kally Masino, wrote the Haggler at 10:08 a.m. on the Sunday that the column was published. Then she wrote again about 20 minutes later. She didn’t actually say “uncle,” but it was sort of implied.

First, though, let’s back up and explain why the Haggler contacted Radio Shack in the first place. It started with a letter from Ronnie Hirsh of Manhattan. He had tried to pre-order an iPhone 5 from his local Radio Shack, and was told that he’d have it by Sept. 21 if he bought a $50 gift card. Well, because of a delivery glitch, it didn’t arrive by then. And, it turned out, that gift card was nonrefundable.

“Radio Shack figured out how to make money without actually selling a phone,” he wrote. “In my opinion, sleazy.”

When the Haggler wrote to Radio Shack, an unnamed person in the media relations department replied, saying the pre-order agreement made clear that gift cards were nonrefundable. This unnamed person also noted (as did Mr. Hirsh, in his original letter) that people who complained loudly enough were, in fact, given refunds. Mr. Hirsh, with his returned $50 in hand, bought his iPhone elsewhere.

The Haggler thinks that if a company makes it plain that a fee or service or a fill-in-the-blank is nonrefundable — which was the case here — it’s up to the consumer to read and understand that fact. Given that Radio Shack refunded Mr. Hirsh’s money despite clearly saying it was not obliged to — well, put this one in the win column for Radio Shack.

So, if this matter was resolved, why did the Haggler invite readers to carpet e-mail Radio Shack?

Well, whoever was interacting with the Haggler stopped doing so after he asked about another matter, soon after the gift-card issue was hashed over. A few months ago, the Haggler returned an item to Radio Shack for which he’d paid cash. At the register, a cashier asked for the Haggler’s phone number. Why would you need a phone number, the Haggler asked.

“The system” requires a phone number, the clerk explained.

Ah, the system. The Haggler managed to get his money back without divulging his phone number, but an online search suggested that others haven’t been as lucky. It was when the Haggler asked about this strange policy that Radio Shack went silent.

Fast-forward to that e-mail from Ms. Masino, the P.R. rep. Reached by phone a few days after her Sunday e-mail, she said she’d been the person corresponding with the Haggler. When asked why she had suddenly ceased all communication, she said she didn’t know. The Haggler asked her to take a guess. Well, she might have handed off the Haggler’s message to someone else on the P.R. team, she said, who might have assumed she’d already dealt with the matter. Or not. At one point, she used the word “dumbfounded,” though it’s not clear what she was dumbfounded about.

The conversation dumbfounded the Haggler.

Later, Ms. Masino e-mailed: “It’s become clear that we didn’t handle your questions as well as you should expect from a national retailer. We owe you an apology because one failed response has distracted from a broader discussion about taking care of customers.”

Apology accepted. Now, what’s with this phone-number demand for cash transactions? “We collect name, address and phone contacts for refunds,” she wrote, “even for small cash purchases, because it creates an audit trail that can be used to make certain each refund is delivered to a specific person and is not a fraudulent event.”

This makes sense only once you realize that the fraudulent events that worry Radio Shack, as Ms. Masino confirmed, are those that might be committed by employees, who could hand over cash they should not be handing over. Many retailers have an identical policy, she added. But the Haggler has encountered it only at Radio Shack. Regardless, the company’s suspicions about its staff members don’t seem a compelling reason to force customers to share personal information. Radio Shack needs either a better system or more employees that it trusts.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

The Haggler: Sales Incentives at Staples Draw Complaints — The Haggler

That’s right. Sell the mattress in the ad, and you’re gone.

How David Mamet is that?

This story came to mind recently, after the Haggler heard from several Staples employees who described some of the pressure they face from management when it comes to sales. But before we hear from the employees, let’s yield the floor to a customer who describes what this pressure looks like from the consumer side. Below is a condensed and edited excerpt from a Web site called my3cents.com, written by someone identified as JA2009. He is trying to buy an Acer computer for $449, as advertised by Staples in a newspaper.

Disaster ensues.

“Upon my arrival, I found an associate who informed me that the laptops were in stock. However, before he would get me one, he proceeded to try to sell me his ‘protection plan.’

“Now, for a number of reasons, including my own knowledge of computers, as well as ready access to free computer repair services, I declined this. The sales associate indicated that it was O.K., and then walked away to, I assumed, get my computer.

“He returned with the store’s general manager, who again proceeded to aggressively push the protection plan onto me. He was extremely rude, implying that I was ‘cheap’ for not adding the plan. He walked away when I finally maintained that I did not want it. Then I heard him call the sales associate over and tell him something. Moments later, the sales associate informed me that the laptop was not in stock after all.”

It gets worse. The would-be customer calls a second Staples, where a salesman says, yes, we have that $449 Acer.

“I walked in and found the exact person whom I spoke to eight minutes earlier. The store was virtually empty. I asked him if I had just spoken to him about the Acer laptop and he confirmed that he was the person. I asked him if they were indeed in stock, and he indicated that they were. I then asked if he could please go get one, because I definitely wanted one. And then, before he goes back to get one, he asks me if I want the service plan.”

You know the rest. After a quick check of inventory, the salesman returns to say the Acers are all gone.

THIS tale, by the way, is three years old, but you will find more recent variations of it on different consumer Web sites. The Haggler chose this one because it is detailed and because it contains no obscenities — rare in this genre.

What is happening here? Why aren’t these stores eager to sell computers, even if customers don’t also want to buy service plans?

Staples, as we will see, won’t answer that question. But according to employees, it has in place a set of incentives that make it unpleasant, to put it mildly, for staffers to sell a computer without a whole bunch of accessories, particularly a service plan.

Staples, explained a manager named Natasja Shah  in a series of conversations and e-mails, has a system called Market Basket that tracks how many dollars’ worth of add-ons each staffer sells.

“The average needs to be $200,” Ms. Shah said. In other words, each time you sell a computer, you need to sell, on average, $200 worth of other stuff. And that average is carefully tracked. Sales staffers who aren’t meeting their goals are coached, and if that doesn’t work, she and other employees said, there will be disciplinary action that can lead up to termination; underperformers can also end up with lots of night and weekends shifts or even a reduction in scheduled hours.

What happens to managers who can’t keep their storewide Market Basket numbers up?

“It’s not pretty,” said a manager who asked not to be identified, fearing repercussions. “There are these conference calls with district managers, and one of them once told a store manager, ‘If you can’t do the job, you can go sell fries at McDonald’s.’ ”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

The Haggler: Running in Circles for a Dell Refund - the Haggler

It’s a question raised whenever the Haggler reads a complaint about Dell, where excellent service — in the tale that follows and the many others you can read about online — seems as rare as steak tartare.

Q. I am a small-business owner who has bought dozens of Dell computers over more than eight years. We returned a poorly functioning laptop to Dell in March and have still not received a credit for it, despite its authorizing the return and a dozen frustrating interactions over the last few months. At this point, it does not even respond to our inquiries. Can you give it a shot? Adam Golden

New Providence, N.J.

A. Mr. Golden sent the Haggler some of his e-mail traffic with Dell, and it is grim reading. Keep in mind that he’s just trying to get a refund, with the minor wrinkle that the company credit card he used to buy the laptop has expired. He could still get a refund on that old card, as it happens, or Dell could have sent him a check. But that would be too easy.

In May, after Mr. Golden asked Dell for any news of progress, he read this from a representative named Heather Davis, the same person he had been corresponding with for months:

“Thank you for calling this to my attention. I am looking into this matter for you presently. Do you have your customer number or phone number to help me track this down?”

Come on. Are we really at the “what’s your customer number?” phase so late in the game? It’s like being on a fourth date and hearing “You’re Bob, right?” over dessert. And this is a customer with a long history of buying Dells. How hard could it have been to get the details she requested?

Once Mr. Golden sent the data, Ms. Davis replied:

“Thanks, Adam. I found it. I am processing what is called a CF025 to get you credited. I will drag any customer care rep who responds to this. I apologize for the delay. Everything was set up correctly but apparently did not process right when the computer returned. Please keep in contact. Because your case is not in my caseload tracker I need your correspondence to keep this at the front of my list.”

If you want to encapsulate what’s wrong with Dell’s customer service in a few sentences, you can’t do much better than this. Ms. Davis needs to “drag” a customer care rep into this? Are these people that hard to track down? Are they busy with hobbies?

And the reference to “any customer care rep” suggests a certain level of disorder. It reminds the Haggler of a restaurant where he once worked, where the kitchen was so chaotic you had to personally beg one of the cooks to prepare each order.

Then there’s the dispiriting “keep in touch,” as though Mr. Golden needs to stay on top of this process or it will either stop or go haywire. All because his case is not in Ms. Davis’s “caseload tracker.” Huh? Why isn’t Mr. Golden’s case already in her caseload tracker? And would moving it there be so hard?

It goes on, but let us segue into the remedy phase of his minor — though far too typical — fiasco.

After an e-mail from the Haggler, a representative from Dell wrote to Mr. Golden to say that his case had been handed to some sort of elite team of service ninjas. Fine. As for an explanation of Dell’s woeful performance, a spokeswoman named Jennifer Davis wrote: “This was an unfortunate case of a representative not following up. We have shared this case as a ‘training opportunity’ with her manager. We also share with the appropriate management teams any process failures we may believe exist.”

The Haggler wrote back and pointed out the obvious: this is a very lame response. What Dell is doing here is  implying that somewhere along the way, an employee messed up, and that once the employee is trained properly, all will be ducky. It’s encouraging that “process failures” will be shared with “appropriate management teams,” but this statement doesn’t have the tenor of a company that is ready to embrace a failure and to learn from it.

It’s hardly clear that Dell understands how much consumer antipathy it has generated in recent years. Nor is there any evidence that Dell appreciates all the service madness that can be read between the lines of its customer service e-mail.

The Haggler doesn’t blame Heather Davis. She seems to be trying. But she’s stuck in a lousy system and managed by a company that has little clue about how to treat a customer.

How clueless is Dell? This clueless: Mr. Golden reports that a few days after the company was contacted by the Haggler, he received a voice mail message from a Dell representative, reporting that a refund was in the works. “I was hoping to speak to you,” the person said on the message, “so I could hear the joy in your voice.”

Ponder that one, dear reader. After months of e-mails and calls, after hours of wholly unnecessary typing and talking, Mr. Golden is finally getting what should have been given to him — and nothing more — long ago, and without all the irritations. And Dell is expecting joy.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

The Haggler: Running in Circles for a Dell Refund - the Haggler

It’s a question raised whenever the Haggler reads a complaint about Dell, where excellent service — in the tale that follows and the many others you can read about online — seems as rare as steak tartare.

Q. I am a small-business owner who has bought dozens of Dell computers over more than eight years. We returned a poorly functioning laptop to Dell in March and have still not received a credit for it, despite its authorizing the return and a dozen frustrating interactions over the last few months. At this point, it does not even respond to our inquiries. Can you give it a shot? Adam Golden

New Providence, N.J.

A. Mr. Golden sent the Haggler some of his e-mail traffic with Dell, and it is grim reading. Keep in mind that he’s just trying to get a refund, with the minor wrinkle that the company credit card he used to buy the laptop has expired. He could still get a refund on that old card, as it happens, or Dell could have sent him a check. But that would be too easy.

In May, after Mr. Golden asked Dell for any news of progress, he read this from a representative named Heather Davis, the same person he had been corresponding with for months:

“Thank you for calling this to my attention. I am looking into this matter for you presently. Do you have your customer number or phone number to help me track this down?”

Come on. Are we really at the “what’s your customer number?” phase so late in the game? It’s like being on a fourth date and hearing “You’re Bob, right?” over dessert. And this is a customer with a long history of buying Dells. How hard could it have been to get the details she requested?

Once Mr. Golden sent the data, Ms. Davis replied:

“Thanks, Adam. I found it. I am processing what is called a CF025 to get you credited. I will drag any customer care rep who responds to this. I apologize for the delay. Everything was set up correctly but apparently did not process right when the computer returned. Please keep in contact. Because your case is not in my caseload tracker I need your correspondence to keep this at the front of my list.”

If you want to encapsulate what’s wrong with Dell’s customer service in a few sentences, you can’t do much better than this. Ms. Davis needs to “drag” a customer care rep into this? Are these people that hard to track down? Are they busy with hobbies?

And the reference to “any customer care rep” suggests a certain level of disorder. It reminds the Haggler of a restaurant where he once worked, where the kitchen was so chaotic you had to personally beg one of the cooks to prepare each order.

Then there’s the dispiriting “keep in touch,” as though Mr. Golden needs to stay on top of this process or it will either stop or go haywire. All because his case is not in Ms. Davis’s “caseload tracker.” Huh? Why isn’t Mr. Golden’s case already in her caseload tracker? And would moving it there be so hard?

It goes on, but let us segue into the remedy phase of his minor — though far too typical — fiasco.

After an e-mail from the Haggler, a representative from Dell wrote to Mr. Golden to say that his case had been handed to some sort of elite team of service ninjas. Fine. As for an explanation of Dell’s woeful performance, a spokeswoman named Jennifer Davis wrote: “This was an unfortunate case of a representative not following up. We have shared this case as a ‘training opportunity’ with her manager. We also share with the appropriate management teams any process failures we may believe exist.”

The Haggler wrote back and pointed out the obvious: this is a very lame response. What Dell is doing here is  implying that somewhere along the way, an employee messed up, and that once the employee is trained properly, all will be ducky. It’s encouraging that “process failures” will be shared with “appropriate management teams,” but this statement doesn’t have the tenor of a company that is ready to embrace a failure and to learn from it.

It’s hardly clear that Dell understands how much consumer antipathy it has generated in recent years. Nor is there any evidence that Dell appreciates all the service madness that can be read between the lines of its customer service e-mail.

The Haggler doesn’t blame Heather Davis. She seems to be trying. But she’s stuck in a lousy system and managed by a company that has little clue about how to treat a customer.

How clueless is Dell? This clueless: Mr. Golden reports that a few days after the company was contacted by the Haggler, he received a voice mail message from a Dell representative, reporting that a refund was in the works. “I was hoping to speak to you,” the person said on the message, “so I could hear the joy in your voice.”

Ponder that one, dear reader. After months of e-mails and calls, after hours of wholly unnecessary typing and talking, Mr. Golden is finally getting what should have been given to him — and nothing more — long ago, and without all the irritations. And Dell is expecting joy.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

The Haggler: Alan Alda and the Customer-Service Headache - Haggler

Most ended with a variation of “I’m never buying another H.P. [fill in the blank] again.” Only one e-mailer, Robert John Bennett of Düsseldorf, Germany, managed to pivot from this unhappy sentiment to a pretty good punch line: “I gave up and bought a Toshiba laptop, which has worked like a charm for three years, and put the H.P. in my storeroom in the basement of my apartment building. The storeroom was later broken into and the laptop stolen. The police investigated, and the excellent German insurance policy covering household effects reimbursed me for the full price of a brand-new computer.”

Then the kicker: “I, of course, feel sorry for the thief.”

That rare mix of frustration and comedy – the Haggler’s favorite cocktail. Which brings us to a new letter:

Q. McAfee can’t seem to resist messing around with my e-mail. Here’s the story: I had been using McAfee, which sells antivirus software, on a PC for a while, but I stopped when I switched to a Mac. Months later, thanks to McAfee’s murky opt-out policy, I realized that the company was still charging me for a subscription. Or trying to. My credit card had expired, and I ignored McAfee’s entreaties to post new credit card information, thinking that would end the subscription.

Unfortunately, McAfee continues to monitor my e-mail, providing daily reports of messages it has intercepted and quarantined. Some of the quarantined e-mails are come-hithers from Russian women, who are apparently very lonely and would feel much better if I just clicked on their link. But others are important to me, so I’ve contacted McAfee several times, requesting that it stop performing this service that I don’t pay for and don’t want.

I haven’t received a reply. I tried chatting online with a McAfee rep, an exchange which could be described as occasionally hilarious but unhelpful. A job for the Haggler?

Alan Alda

Manhattan

A. Whatever the flaws of its response to this modest imbroglio, no one can accuse McAfee of coddling a celebrity. Yes, our writer this week is that Alan Alda. He sent a transcript of his online exchange with a McAfee agent, who, it turns out, was typing from an office in Chennai, India. In this excerpt, which has been condensed a bit, Mr. Alda is trying to persuade this rep to cease the alerts about the quarantining of some e-mails and to put an end to the quarantines themselves:

Mr. Alda: This week several e-mails sent to me that were important were quarantined. I didn’t know about it until I got the alert. I would like to stop the quarantining. Not just the e-mails telling me about it.

Rep: I have successfully canceled the auto renewal feature for your McAfee account so you will not receive any renewal notices to your e-mail address.

Mr. Alda: Good. But will that also stop the quarantining?

Rep: You need to contact our technical support. But in order to contact technical support you need to have a valid McAfee account.

Mr. Alda: I am now in the land of Kafka.

Rep: Do you have any valid McAfee product?

Mr. Alda: No, I don’t. I haven’t used McAfee for years. I’m willing to pay for a service I have not used for years, but I don’t like the idea of paying to stop using it.It’s Samuel Beckett meets offshore Internet customer service. At the root of this problem is a bit of confusion, and the Haggler will summarize it here:

Mr. Alda thought he’d ditched McAfee’s spam protection when he switched to a Mac, but the company that runs his e-mail domain, Tangonet, subscribes to MX Logic, a spam filter product owned by McAfee. To cancel MX Logic would require that this company get in touch with McAfee, because it’s the one paying for MX Logic. In other words, Mr. Alda should have been talking to Tangonet.

But because he once had a McAfee subscription with a different computer, and because he was still getting renewal requests from the company, Mr. Alda figured that this issue was his to fix.

So it’s a simple misunderstanding. The confounding part, and what McAfee executives say they find embarrassing, is that the Haggler’s intervention was needed. Referring to the online chat, Jason Grier, who runs the global support team, said: “The question is what do you do when you don’t know what to do. The first thing you do is raise your hand and get a supervisor involved. And clearly that didn’t happen here.”

Mr. Grier was also concerned that nobody returned the e-mail that Mr. Alda sent. Mr. Grier said that was because the guy who heads the team that handles such issues was out of town, dealing with a family emergency. The Haggler suggested that any system that grinds to a halt when one person takes a leave is a system badly in need of some tinkering.

He agreed: “This will cause a thorough review of our process and we will fill any hole we find.”

Tangonet, in the meantime, has made some adjustments to the filtering of Mr. Alda’s e-mail, and it seems to be working fine. Let’s give Mr. Alda the last word:

“Once we cleared up the misunderstanding of which software was quarantining my messages, I was able to stop that feature and still keep the function that blocked e-mails from Olga in Russia. Although, I kind of miss those e-mails. I think she really liked me.”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.