or the alternate title: Never, never ever buy off ebay!
after tormenting myself with the lack of internet and the fact that there is no way of writing a licence paper at the library, i have decided that i neede to buy a laptop. ppl back home confirmed and sent the money, so i considered the quickest and more effective way of getting one was off ebay...
after a lot of debate i chose one from a user with 1500 good recommendations, so i said it was ok...
first problem: sending the money
-in France you cannot put cash on someone else's bank card unless you go to the bank where the card was issued (in a different city, in this case)
-i didn't have a french bank card then, so i couldn't transfer
-you cannot transfer money from your international bcr card unless you are in Romania personally
after pain and torture i managed to discover the mandate by post, which of course costs a lot, not to mention comissions from drawing money from the ro card and all that
this was on the 20th of September. they got the money after a delay that kept me awake at night ( because in case it was lost, the post will start to investigate this after 3 months- i'm curious when they would stop investigating it)
so i waited anxiously a week for the laptop, checking my mailbox every day...nothing...
i sent them a message, and their reply was: "oh, we have a missing piece, we hope to get it soon"
my answer was very menacing and all that, so after a few hours they stumbled upon the missing piece and promised to send the laptop the next working day (of course it was friday).
after one more week of torture and not getting anything, i go to accueil to ask about my package. of course, my favourite old hag was there. She told me that she's busy and that i need to show her the receipt that i got in the mail in order for her to check if it's there. I could clearly see the 3 packages that were there, and one was big enough to be mine.
i told her i will wait for her to finish her work so she can check...she just replied "you do not understand the subtleties of the french language, missy. if i say i'm busy, it's that i don't want to help you"! great!
shouting, menacing and crying didn't budge her
the next morning i found a nicer person in accueil who gave me the package. the receipt was somewhere on the floor, that's why it wasn't in my mailbox...
i enjoyed having a laptop for 23 minutes. then i realized that the harddisk had 10 gigas less than supposed to...damn...and hence it's small in general, this was a big difference.
instantly wrote an email to the ebay guys.
they replied that there has probably been a mistake and they would like to offer me a fnac cheque in exchange for the missing gigas ( fnac= sort of big bookstore)
i replied to shove the fnac cheque somewhere and to send me my harddisk..
so i had to wait another week so they could send me a receipt so i could send the laptop back free of charge (oh, forgot to mention that the normal delay between our 2 cities is 1 day. everything i sent or received was 4-10 days late. great post system)
then came the day of parture...and the start of two agonizing weeks without any reply from them.
and one day it came:
"there has been a terrible mistake, it seems we have sent someone else's laptop on your adress, please could you refuse it so it comes back to us."
hum, this says alot about how professional they are...
and also that they sent my laptop too
of course, the other laptop came in 2 days, and i had to refuse it (please do not comment on this),
and mine was again a week late...
so, after buying it on the 20th of september, i got it on the 7th of november...
and guess what? it had 10 gigas more than it should have had ;)
didn't reply to their last mail, i just think of the poor guy somewhere who was waiting for this harddisk...
...and the dead pixel is another story, another laptop, maybe another blog, huh?
No comments:
Post a Comment