So my long-awaited X61 tablet finally arrived on the 5th; I ordered it during a Black Friday sale during the Thanksgiving long weekend. At first I had it sent to my school address under the apparently mistaken presumption that it would actually take 5 to 7 business days to ship. I figured that I’d get it around the time finals were over and would have time to play with it while waiting for the bf to finish up his finals. When it still wasn’t in my hands during finals week two weeks later, I realized I should probably try to reroute the shipping to my permanent address in case it didn’t arrive until I left.
It did not seem like such a complicated task, but it turned out to be one. Apparently with Lenovo, and disclaimer: I don’t want to poo poo a single company when others may do the same, you can’t change the shipping address once an order is made. You can’t reroute the shipping either until the item is actually shipped, which is just inane, seeing as how allowing the item to ship directly to the new destination rather than change destinations mid-ship would probably save the company itself a bunch of money.
Furthermore, you can’t get any tax money refunded either, even if the tax rate is lower in the state of your new destination, as it was in my case. I got kind of irritated on this second issue with the clearly foreign customer rep who was on the line when I called them the second time, not willing to give up after the unsuccessful first. I asked for clarification rhetorically, “So you’re telling me that even though I’m getting this item nearly a month after I ordered it and as a result of this inordinate delay I have to ship it elsewhere, I can’t get any tax money back for shipping it to the new location?” The customer rep said he was “Sorry ma’am, but this is our policy.”
The laptop finally shipped on Christmas eve, when I got an email notification of shipment. I tried to call right away to get the package rerouted then, but as I suspected, Lenovo wasn’t taking calls that day. All I could do was anxiously track my package through the UPS website. It turned out the next day that the package was stalled because of Christmas and would be set to reship on the 29th. My calls finally got through the next day, at which time I was told my rerouting request would take two days to process. Finally, I saw online that the package had arrived at my school address–the wrong address, now that I was home–with one failed attempt at delivery. It was only then that my rerouting request went through. The package finally started heading the right way–the right way now being my boyfriend’s parents house, now that that was where I planned to spend New Year’s. The rest is history.
The lesson of this rant is that if you value the timely delivery of your laptop, don’t order it from Lenovo. That said, I realize that ordering it right before the holidays was a big factor in the delays, but what could I do? Black Friday was when they were having the special sale!
So I finally have it. Thank goodness (I’m trying to get out of the habit of saying “Thank God” when I’m nonreligious and proud of it) for the bf, because having him around makes setting up new computers a million times breezier. As an engineer who does this kind of thing for fun anyway, he eagerly helped delete all of the unnecessary trial versions of different antivirus protections and installed Microsoft Office 2007 seamlessly. He also showed me how to use OneNote, which I had never used before, in order to make taking notes easier.
I got the tablet in the first place because I thought it would make notetaking easier. I was tired of rummaging through my stack of notebooks looking for the right ones through my color-coding system and looking for a functional pen whenever I got ready for class, all while watching the bf slickly slip his X41 tablet into his backpack, all set for stylish notetaking. I think this issue, the fact that my old Inspiron is going on 5 years, and the Black Friday sale all justified the investment, even though a regular notebook would have been much more economical.
Thus far, my friends and family seem to enjoy playing with the tablet immensely. It’s amusing how if you give a person a piece of lined paper and a pen, it’s of absolutely no interest to him, but if you give him the same thing, but on a screen, it becomes amazing and provides endless entertainment because you can “write on it!” with “so many different pens and markers to choose from!”
There’s still much to learn about the tablet, for example, how to convert written text into type for an entire document (right now I only know how to do it line by line), and maybe I’ll even write a blog entry using the stylus, but just having it is pretty exciting for now, and I think it’ll be extremely useful during the coming semester in Shanghai. I wonder whether using laptops to take notes in China is as common among the college set as it is in the U.S. I wonder whether Chinese students use tablets at all and whether I’ll be seen as Chinese around campus, or as a foreign, yet Chinese, oddity. This latter question only touches the tip of the iceberg in terms of thoughts I’ve had about my upcoming travels to the Far East, but unfortunately I think I’ll have to wait and devote several blog entries entirely to that subject.
Affectionately,
Dorothy
Oz Evolving 