As part of the product review article series we started for ISSJ - Information Storage & Security Journal, we ordered a Sony VAIO laptop by phone by dialing the toll free number (1 877 865 SONY) provided at Sony's Sony Style Web site http://www.sonystyle.com in the United States.

The order was placed on February 14, 2005 and we paid additional shipping charges to receive the computer on Friday, February 18, 2005.

 We never recevied the computer as promised on February 18th, as a matter of fact, today, on Saturday, March 12, 2005, we still don't have the order in our office. (So we couldn't even start or product review on this model.)

In the past four weeks, Sony's toll free telephone menu was also changed to make the matters even worse and almost impossible to reach a customer service or a sales representative. After more than 30 minutes of trying to find a person on the phone, we were put on hold several more times, and every time the Sony representative who picked up the phone gave us more conflicting information than before. She often apologized that her system was very slow and busy (at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning).

Now, today, on Saturday, March 12, 2005 (please remember the order was placed on February 14th and additional shipping charges were paid to be delivered on February 18th) we were told that Fedex was not able to find the SYS-CON Media headquarters address and returned the computer back to Sony. However the same day, the same Fedex driver delivered the external keyboard and the mouse (from Sony)  which was part of the computer's original configuartion, to the same address which, according to Sony could not be located.

Sony customer service rep put us on hold one more time to check if a credit was applied to our account for the computer which was never delivered. She had to go to another desk to find this information on a different system. When she returned to the phone, she told us a credit for the amount of $2,974.35 was issued, however we were charged for regular and expedited shipping charges because our delivery address was impossible to find. We owed Sony the shipping charges for the computer we never received.

As a fnal attempt, we kindly asked the Sony representative, if we could speak with a supervisor. First she answered us by saying that there were no supervisors, then she said her supervisor "Adam Price" just walked in but he would not take our call. We tried to explain to her that we ordered the computer from a technology magazine for the purposes of writing a product review, and we would really like to speak to a supevisor. She put us on hold for another copuple of minutes. When she came back to the phone, she repeated her answer, Adam Price (she said I think that's what his name is) will not take the phone call, if we wish we can leave a message to his voice mail.

So we could not conduct our product review for SONY VAIO S Series, VGN S 380 quite yet. The only comment we can make at this point is we would never attempt to purchase a computer from SONY again after our adventure. If the experience we went though is indicative of SONY's customer service, then I personally would not purchase SONY stock either to secure my retirement.

/FK