Customer Service & Best Buy

On May 3 of this year, my husband and I went to BestBuy.com and purchased an e-Machine computer for our home office. Rather than paying for the computer to be shipped to our apartment, we requested to pick it up at our local store. They sent us an e-mail when it was ready to be picked up, and everything seemed to be going smoothly.

Today is May 27, so we've had the computer for exactly 24 days. Less than a month. I woke up this morning, poured myself a cup of coffee, turned on the morning news and booted my computer to check my e-mail. Standard wake-up procedure. I was still a little bleary-eyed, but I know I wasn't seeing things when the computer failed to open my desktop. Instead, it rebooted on its own, and started the entire process over again.

After three tries, it finally went to the Check Disk screen, and I let it go through its motions. It rebooted again, and I received an error message. By that point, I was quite pissed because although I'd had my morning dose of caffeine, I'd yet to have a cigarette. So I went outside, furiously smoked a Kingsley, and came back inside to give it another try.

Seriously, sometimes that works.

Of course, it didn't this time, and I couldn't get the computer to behave. I pulled out my receipt, my PC recovery disk and all of the other paperwork that came with the macine. I looked everywhere for a phone number for Gateway Computers Technical Support, but all I could find was their website address.

If you're having trouble with your computer, isn't there a good chance that you are unable to connect to the Internet?

Thoroughly frustrated, I called the toll free number for 800-number directory assistance and obtained the phone number for Gateway computers. To make a long story short, the technical support agent walked me through every trick in the book, and we could not get my PC to boot.