For all those who ever worked at ServiceZone (speaking of Lake City and all...)

In early 2002 I spent six terrible weeks working at a call-center in Lake City, Florida, which at the time was called ServiceZone. At the time ServiceZone out-sourced to Dell Computers, and provided staff for Dell Product Support, Dell Sales, and Dell Financial Services. I was hired to work for Dell Financial Services. They were six long, terrible weeks. I was shocked at the multitude of unethical business practices conducted by Dell, to which the company turned a blind eye. People threatened to sue Dell (and me personally!) every day. After those six weeks, I thought I'd be hearing about a class action suit against Dell any day. Five years later, it's finally happened.

The New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, announced yesterday that his office had filed a lawsuit against Dell Inc. and its Dell Financial Services unit, accusing them of deceptive business practices and of failing to provide adequate customer service. [...] More specifically, he said, Dell failed to provide repair service to customers who bought contracts for onsite and expedited service. In addition, he said, Dell routinely sought to attract customers by promotional offers claiming that the financing was interest-free. Instead, the suit charges, many customers faced interest rates on their purchases that were as high as 29 percent. [full article here]

Oh. My. God. Every day I was there, I pretty much spent eight hours straight (and more) trying to "help" people who had been scammed by their salesperson. They'd essentially been tricked into accepting a contract which they thought gave them 0% APR, but which turned out to be 29% APR. And you know what I could do to help them? NOTHING. Of course, as soon as I would tell someone that I couldn't help them (which was the truth!), they would demand to speak to my manager. Now, since there was nothing our managers could do to help them either, we were required to do everything in our power to convince the customer that they really didn't want to talk to the manager after all. Not surprisingly, I got cussed out several times a day.

Here's hoping Andrew Cuomo kicks Dell's ass!