A few years ago, Kate made a horrible mistake. As the IT contact for her employer, she gave Dell her cell phone number. She tells Consumerist that apparently this gave the company license to give her status updates on the company’s Dell orders between 5 and 6 A.M. Pacific time. Even after she no longer worked in that position. Even after repeated phone calls and e-mails begging Dell to stop calling her. The worst part? Kate isn’t the only one.

Years ago, I was the contact for IT for the company I worked for. We ordered a bunch of computers from Dell one day, and I made the worst decision I’ve ever made – I gave them my cell phone number. About a year ago, I left the IT position, and called Dell and told them to remove me from their contact list – I even gave them the new guy’s information. Despite this, I still get the status calls on ever Dell order the company places – which seems to be fairly often. What’s worse is that Dell seems to have no sense of what acceptable hours are. Most of the calls are between 5:00AM and 6:00AM! I have to keep my cell phone on all night for other reasons, but being awoken at 5:30am by an overly-perky automated message from Dell telling me that the parts requested are backordered is awful.

I can barely count the number of emails and calls that I have sent/made in an attempt to get this to stop. But what worries me more is that I found countless postings in other forums about Dell doing the same thing to other people at horrific hours.

What I’d really like is Michael Dell’s cell and home numbers, so I can call him at 5am to tell him that his customer service is horrendous. But for now, I’ll turn to Consumerist and its readers. Advice? Other ways of getting through to Dell?

If it makes you feel better, you could try e-mailing Michael Dell at five in the morning Texas time. That’s michael_dell@dell.com. You could also try the e-mail addresses that another reader used in her EECB, in a strangely similar situation:

Cc: michael_dell@dell.com, donald_carty@dell.com, ronald_garriques@dell.com, michael_cannon@dell.com, mark_jarvis@dell.com, lawrence_tu@dell.com, susan_sheskey@dell.com, andrew_esparza@dell.com, paul_bell@dell.com, stephen_felice@dell.com, david_marmonti@dell.com, brad_anderson@dell.com, jeffrey_clarke@dell.com, martin_garvin@dell.com, alex_gruzen@dell.com, joan_hooper@dell.com, william_gray@dell.com

Good luck, Kate. Sleep well and dream of victory.

Dell Has Called Every Day For The Past Eight Months… And I’m Not A Customer!

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