Fiasco

On May 3rd, 2007 I ordered a pair of 36 gigabyte drives from Computer Giants. I'd ordered from them several times in the past and had preferred dealing with them since they were (I thought) New York based. This meant that using their free ground shipping I would get my order the next day. In the last year my orders would show up 3, 4 or up to 7 days later. I guess I had been lucky early on as the items I ordered came from New York. The later orders were coming from other locations, California, Pennsylvania and most recently Florida. The problem is that my most recent order was royally screwed up. I had spoken to a sales rep asking if he could find out where the drives were to ship from as I needed them for a server replacement I was building. I had a deadline. The sales rep, I think his name was Bob or Rob, said he saw my order and was going to get back to me with an ETA. When I didn't get a call back I should have known this would be the order from hell. Two days later the drives arrived. I opened the box to start building the server. WHOA! They sent 18GB drives??? !!! The order confirmation clearly said 36GB drives. I called customer service immediately. They acknowledged there was a screw up. I asked if they could overnight the correct drives since they screwed up the order and give me an RMA to return the incorrect drives. "Customer Service" (there an oxymoron for you) said that the RMA department would get back to me in 3 to 5 days with the RMA but I would need to place a NEW order for the correct drives. Even though they screwed up they wanted me to place a new order, pay them again and wait for RMA to correct their screw up. Well it took numerous calls and emails over a week long period to get an RMA. They said they issued a call tag and UPS was picking the wrong drives up. Dissatisfied with their handling I ordered the drives I needed from another supplier. The call tag never arrived. I called again, they said they'd send another blaming the screw up on UPS. Again, no call tag. I finally pried their account number out of "customer service" and arranged for a pickup myself. UPS picked up the package on May 24th and delivered it to these morons on May 25th at 09:33 EST. Once I had confirmation that someone signed for the package I called asking when I would receive credit. Customer Service said it would take 2 to 10 days to process the return. Two to ten days? Their RMA number was 532. I asked whether that was 532 RMAs this year or since the company opened. It was 532 since the company opened 10 years ago (if I could believe anything they were saying at this point). I called several times. Their Californing office said to call New York. New York said to call Californing. After 10 business days I called to get status. California said to call New York. New York put me on hold for 10 minutes so I hung up and dialed them back. The guy said it's a big warehouse and after getting the UPS tracking number and seeing that someone there signed for the package said I'd be credited, by someone in California. Not trusting these morons I asked for the NY guy to three way conference the guy from California to get the credit process rolling. He could not conference or transfer me. I called California, put the extension into their call menu system and ended up in someone's voice mail. I called back to Customer Service in California. The woman knew my voice at this point and went to get the guy on the phone. The obnoxious bastard said he'd have to review the case to make sure everything was in order before he could refund my purchase price. I asked him if this was any way to run a business. They had the drives for 10 business days and no one updated the "ticket", now he had to start reviewing. I being extremely pissed pressed the issue trying to get an answer, he finally said something like okay buddy and hung up on me. I had not read Pricewatch's reviews before having this problem. After the first day I looked at the reviews to see their RMA process and "customer service" is a long standing problem. Word to the wise: Steer clear of Computer Giants, especially if you use Paypal. Paypal provides NO recourse in cases like this. If you can't find the item somewhere else (unlikely) make sure you use your American Express card to deal with these jerks. When they screw up your order you can at least use American Express's excellent customer support to dispute the charge and wait for the jerks at Computer Giants to issue a call tag. Caveat Emptor!