DABS.com is really starting to piss me off. I ordered a new hard drive for my laptop, along with an external enclosure for some of my other hard drives lying around. Now when I ordered the drive I knew it was out of stock, and thought that DABS would order in a new batch when I placed an order, as they usually do. Wrong. 18 days after placing my order, I decide to contact them to get some status on the thing.

Now to get in touch with them, you have to send them a message through their forms on the web. They simply don’t do telephone service at all, nothing, nada. So I go through their help system in order to try and find an email form and eventually find one that kind of suits my query, then send it off. A couple of days later, I receive a canned (i.e. templated) email with just the same information I read through their help system and no details relating to my query. I cancelled my order.

I then set about finding an alternative supplier, which in this case happened to be Misco. I placed an order on Friday evening, had the order confirmed over the weekend, and the hard disk enclosure was shipped Monday morning first thing, and arrived on Tuesday morning. The hard drive was listed as having a 5 day lead time, so no surprise it hasn’t arrived yet, but I thought I’d tempt my luck and phone up their customer services and see if I can get some info.

I phone up their number, and I hear just a couple of notes of hold music before being put onto an operator. She puts me on hold to contact her colleague who is in charge of that particular batch of items, but she isn’t picking up her phone. So what does she do? Takes my email address and emails her colleague for the information.

Now that, my friends, is customer service. Bye bye DABS!