For Sale to Dell Computers

For sale: one coffee cup. Only $499.99. What is that, Dell? It arrived broken and won’t hold coffee? Well we offered you the Special Warrantee for only $199.99 when you bought it, good for one year, but you didn’t buy it, remember? Too-bad-so-sad, but coffee cups are made of breakable material, and you can’t just expect to get one without a chip or a crack that actually holds coffee. Duh!

But here’s what we’ll do. Since you just bought it, if you pay our special Ceramicware Fee of only $130.00 for 90 days, you can give us a two-hour window when you’ll be home sitting around doing nothing at all, ready to drop everything for hours and hours at the ring of a phone, and we will have our outsourced techs call you at their convenience—maybe within that time period, and maybe not (because we’re not real clear on your time zones)—and explain to you over the phone how to fix it. For hours and hours and hours, we will guide you through the process of taking plaster and filling in that chip. In other words, you get to pay a large amount of money to spend an enormous amount of time fixing your own coffee cup! Voila! Fixed!

It’s not, you say? You say it still leaks, and the plaster got wet and fell out? It’s probably because you used the wrong brand. For only $50 more, you can use our brand, which we highly recommend, because it’s specially made for coffee cups. If that still won’t work, it’s probably that you didn’t use enough and you will need another container. Our plaster-applicators will also be necessary for $50 more, as will our hardeners, shellacs, primers, and drop cloths. Then we’ll sell you a set of paints so that our techs can guide you through the easy-peasy process of re-painting the coffee cup design for 187 hours on the phone with someone you can’t always understand. Just be aware they’ll be a teeny bit patronizing if you are not a professional artist, and a woman to boot.

Still doesn’t work? Lucky you. Because you paid that tech fee, you can just do it all over again. And again, if necessary! And again and again and again! And if we apply the plaster using the hard blow of a hammer, we will simply tell you not to worry, insist that the powder that was once your cup is just fine, and hang up, because we know that when you call back, you will just get someone else. You see the nice thing is, we stand behind our outsourced techs…so far behind them, in fact, that you could actually say we are hiding back there! Try to find us, ha ha!  The beauty is, because we don’t have to pay them nearly what we’d have to pay American ones, we pass the abuse on to you, the customer.

Of course you could always pay your own coffee cup repair people at several hundred more if you insist on actually drinking your coffee. Not our problem! Also not our problem that you pay for 20 hours of phone minutes per month and have actually run out of minutes a week early on more than one occasion because you’ve spent that much time on the phone with us!

If, however, we are feeling especially generous, we will ship you a box complete with instructions on packing your coffee cup, and we will let you mail the cup to Timbuktu for only 7-10 business days. We like to say it that way, because it sounds so much nicer than “several weeks without a cup of coffee,” doesn’t it? We won’t ship you a new, unbroken coffee cup, of course—because you didn’t purchase the warrantee—but what we will do for you is fill the chip in ourselves with plaster and then ship it back again. And if it arrives with another few cracks and chips, oh well! Because the truth is, “we”—meaning our outsourced plaster-applying techs—can just keep this up until your coffee cup is over a year old, and then we can either sell you another outrageously-priced warrantee or act horrified that you want us to keep fixing your old, broken up coffee cup. The nerve!

Let’s toast, shall we? To our cleverness in coming up with a way to scam money by charging honest people over and over and over for a bad product that never worked right in the first place. Drink up! Except not you, because that piece-of-crap cup will never work.

Isn't this great Squidward? Just you & me together for hours and hours and hours! And then the sun'll come up, and it'll be tomorrow, and we'll still be working! It'll be just like a sleepover! Only we'll be sweaty and covered with grease! ~SpongeBob SquarePants