angryWrong!
We placed the order on Thursday, May 29 around 12:30pm. Immediately after submitting the order via the web form we received the "Order Acknowledged" e-mail. Less than two minutes late we received the "Order Confirmed" e-mail. Everything went though, was checked over, and getting ready to be built. We were happy...until the next day. My boyfriend went online during his lunch break to check the status (just to see if they had started building it yet) and found out that the order had been CANCELLED. He called customer service and was told that the cancellation had not been intentional, just a computer glitch, and that we should just go ahead and order the computer again.
Okay...fine. So, on Friday, May 30 around 4:00pm my boyfriend logs back into the Dell site and reorders the computer a second time. He receives the "Order Acknowledged" e-mail at 4:10pm. The "Order Confirmed" e-mail never comes. We wait for it over the weekend but it still doesn't come. He calls customer support during his lunch break on Monday and was on the phone for over an hour, being shuffled from department to department, only to eventually be told that the order was cancelled via our credit card company. As soon as I heard that I knew that it was a load of crap. I have enough money on that card to pay for the computer five times over. It crossed my mind that it could have been a security lock, having had one temporary transaction from Dell already listed on my recent activity, but I doubted it. They would have called me if that were the case.
Anyway, my boyfriend went and ordered the computer for a third time, this time using my credit card via paypal (rather than giving them my card directly). The "Order Acknowledged" e-mail arrives to his in-box at 12:34pm. As soon as I picked him up from work and we went back to his place, I got online and e-mailed customer service. The next day (July 4th, guess the outsourced guys don't get the day off like we do) I get a response which basically said: "Sorry for the past inconvenience. I can't help you with order status questions, so for information about your order, call THIS 800-number". ::headdesk::
This morning I called my credit card company. According to the nice woman that I spoke with, Dell never even tried submitting the cost of the second order. So, the guy lied to us. They dropped the order without even attempting to work on it.
We still haven't received an "Order Confirmed" e-mail for the third attempt. I'm assuming that they cancelled it as well. My boyfriend is trying to be optimistic and wanted to give them today to work on it (since yesterday was a holiday), and if we don't hear from them by tomorrow he's going to call again. I've pretty much given up all hope now. For some reason they just don't want to sell me that computer.
I was going to try to order it for a fourth time under my name (since the last three attempts were in my boyfriends name, trying to take advantage of the student discount) and deal with paying the extra $30, but they took down the 18% discount for that model, so now it's not even worth it.
Edit: (7/6/06 6:28PM) My boyfriend called Dell again today. After the usual call shuffling from department to department he was finally told his account (for some unknown reason) was placed on "collections hold" and that is why all of the orders had auto-cancelled. He was also told that, in order to purchase a computer without being held up, he should just make a new account with a different e-mail and use that to order the computer. He did. As usual, the "Order Acknowledged" e-mail came shortly after placing the order...still no "Order Confirmation". He's on the phone with them again now, talking to someone from the financial department. Hopefully they'll be able to tell us what the hell is going on.