An Open Letter To Mark Hurd

[Oxygenate]

This is HP:  No driver with my printer.  I telephone (via my mobile/cell) for a disk and am told to download from internet.  I have no telephone/internet connection, being new in house.  There then follows 5 telephone cals and 8 e-mails (from a friend's house).  I am told twice by HP employees (including one honest man who said the whole thing was crazy) to take my machine back to the shop.  This will then be shipped back to HP and a replacement machine sent. This involves a 30 mile round trip, repacking and disconnecting etc., a parking fee and 90 minutes of my time. Petrol in this country is $8/gallon.  By now I have internet connection but am detemined that I shall obtain this disk. I write to the Managing Director of HP in the UK a Stephen Gill .  No response.  I discover he is American so don't expect any manners such as a reply. I write again, still no response.  Decide that perhaps it is not bad manners, just illiteracy. I write to this Michael Hurd creature (postal cost is over a $1); no reply of course. 

I send the Stephen Gill creature a court summons - cost $35.

Over the next two weeks I receive three disks; er, uhm, sorry chaps - they are for the wrong machine. 

Five weeks later Gill announces mass redundancies at the UK HP plant.  I am not surprised.

Incidentally, I asked twice as to what would happen to the machine which I would need to take back to the shop who would then send it back to HP who would then send another machine which would then be delivered to me (a 30 mile round trip again).  One employee did not know, another said it would be crushed.

Now I know the executive class in the US care not two hoots for the environment, but by following this route the carbon footprint of the disk would be about equal to the manufacture of a Jumbo Jet. 

This story has to be true - no-one could make it up. 

This is HP.  It is not an HP 'thing', but an American thing where all concept of  customer service has disappeared.  I have being doing business and travelling to the US for some 35 years.  There used to be some 'bare bones' of customer service but regretably no more.