In theory, Lenovo is a company based in China that sells computers. Most of the time, this seems to be true: they make computers, and customers ship or bring the computers to their homes and are pleased. What happens alarmingly often, though, is that the whole process falls apart. It’s as if some people aren’t worthy of owning a Lenovo machine, and the company makes the process difficult deliberately to stand in their way. That’s what happened to Alex. Lenovo pushed back his computer’s ship date repeatedly: annoying, but it happens. Then they canceled his entire order, but forgot to notify him.

Alex writes:

I’ve been reading over your posts regarding the anti-capitalist jokester extraordinaire, Lenovo, and have found myself in the same bog as many of your readers.

Two days ago, I purchased a laptop from Lenovo’s website. It was a T430-S, on sale as part of their “Black Friday” special with an estimated ship date of 11/29/12. Yesterday, I checked the status of my order and they had changed the estimated ship date to 12/20/12. This was annoying, but production delays happen.

I found this to be considerably more annoying, when I went back to their website and found that they are currently advertising a ship date of 12/05/12 for a new purchase of the same computer with identical specs. I’m thinking there may be some bait-and-switch involved here, in which they only provide the real ship date after taking payment.

But that’s not all. This morning, I checked my order status again to see if they had updated the ship date, planning to call customer service to see if my order could be expedited if my already purchased machines’ ship date was still a couple of weeks later than the one advertised for a new purchase. When I did so, I found that they had canceled my purchase outright. They didn’t bother emailing or calling me. Probably didn’t send a carrier pigeon or smoke signal either.

So I called their customer service number, after waiting on old for 5 minutes, the rep. determined there was a problem with my credit card and he transferred my call to their credit card department. While on hold, I verified with my credit card company that their was nothing wrong with my card, and that they had a payment pending to Lenovo for the full purchase price of the computer, accessories and taxes. The person answering the phone in their credit card department was particularly unhelpful, saying I had to order the computer again through their sales department and that there was nothing to be done with the current order because it had been canceled. My request to speak to his supervisor, or any supervisor was denied. His exact words were “I have no supervisor.”

My response: “Okay, can you put your boss on the phone, you’re not the CEO of the company, you have a boss.”

His reply: “My boss doesn’t take phone calls.”

My response: “Well, when I called in I agreed to fill out a customer survey at the end of my call, can you transfer me to the survey then.”

His answer: “I can’t do that.”

My, now agitated, response: “You can’t be that f***ing incompetent.” And I hung up.

You’d think their business model was not predicated on selling computers or something.

So the company can afford to cancel orders all over the place, and lets call-center employees romp around with no supervision. Gotcha.

We’ve often theorized in the past that Lenovo is actually a very elaborate and expensive anti-capitalist prank, existing only to distract customers and waste their time while keeping them from owning computers. See also:

Lenovo Screws Up Every Part Of Computer Purchase
Lenovo Sees Imaginary Address Discrepancy, Won’t Sell Me Computer
Lenovo Won’t Sell You A Computer, Won’t Explain Why

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