Dell. Please let me give you some money. Go on, please....

Today at work it was time to finalise the deals over getting new interactive Smartboards into some of the rooms.
After extensive e-mail haggling with the company in question I finally got the deal I wanted and we can probably go ahead and order them tomorrow.

Part of the whole package was to get a new laptop for general ICT use.
I honestly thought this would be the easy part of the whole thing. Seeing as the previous ICT tech had outfitted the whole place in Dell servers and workstations I thought I'd order the laptop from Dell as well.

Oh, what a bloody mistake that one turned out to be.
You really wouldn't think it would be that difficult to ask one question and then give them £400 in exchange for laptop but dear god almighty it was.

5 phone calls. After being on hold for at least 5 minutes each time, the operator I spoke to transferred me to the sales department after I patiently told him I wanted to buy 1 laptop for business / educational account.
Or at least that's what I kept asking him to do.
Now I don't know about you, but I think a big company like Dell should probably have a big red button on the phone that's marked
"Immediate transfer to sales, this ones desperate to spend money"

It seems that Dell have a button marked "Random".
General Reception.
Home service voicemail.
Silence followed by disconnection.
Dell server sales, mailbox full, disconnection.
Answerphone to sales team.

That was it, the last one got a snotty message suggesting that it shouldn't be this hard to give a company selling computers a few hundred quid for a bloody computer.
Hopefully tomorrow I may get a call back.

Of course, at some point in the future I imagine we'll be going through the trial of getting a new house computer.
Somehow I don't think Dell will be top of the list now.

Update: 30/01/07
Finally spoke to someone from the educational department. Apologies etc.
Informed them of the £359 laptop I wanted. Then the bloke told me that we could only have that one if we ordered off the website with a personal credit card. The cheapest we could order as a school on invoice was £440.
What a complete con this whole Dell experience is turning out to be.
He's meant to be getting back to me with a sub £400 deal tomorrow.