So predictably I didn't hear from "Karen" again until I e-mailed her on the 14th. She didn't respond for more than a day, and when she did she said this:
I Apologize for the delay, I waiting for approval to proceed with the refund. Unfortunately I cannot proceed until I get approval from the regional manager. I just reached out to him again .
About an hour after I got that e-mail, she then told me this:
A refund order has been placed under order number Service order: [redacted]. the refund is for a total of 253.50.
The refund team will be proceeding with your exchange, once the ticket is approved they will contact you .
I'm sorry, what? I didn't pay $253 for the monitor, I paid upwards of $300. I redirected her attention to my Newegg invoice, which I had already sent, and she replied promptly and curtly that the amount had been updated to the correct $313. Alright then.
That was on the 15th. I have again heard nothing from this company for a week. So, yesterday I e-mailed "Karen" one more time asking her how long this process usually takes. She replied:
I Apologies for the Inconvenience, Unfortunately this is no longer my department . I do not know how long it usually takes. All I can see is that your order is still on the approval process. they should be contacting you as soon as it is fully approved. You can try calling 1800-Samsung and provide them with the refund order number [redacted], and tell them to transfer you to the refund department.
Lovely.
Calling up 1-800-Samsung I ended up being on hold for a surprisingly long time—just five or six minutes, but in the past I had gotten to a representative immediately. The person I ended up speaking to had such heavily-accented speech that I could hardly understand him. I gave him my ticket number and he put me on hold. He gave me a reason, but I have no idea what he said. After that, he came back and spoke to me at length; again, I don't really know what he was saying but after some back-and-forth I figured out that he was telling me there was nothing he could do and that I had to wait for the refund team to contact me.
He assured me that I would hear from them "within twenty-four to forty-eight hours," so we'll see what happens, I guess. Note that I started all this mess in March and it is about to be July. Oh, and my
aforementioned friend's monitor broke again. She's getting a refund through Newegg, though. Another friend of hers has several of these monitors, and some of his
show the problem too. A quick glance at Amazon reviews indicates that
this is a pretty widespread issue with the monitor.As I mentioned before the most frustrating thing about all of this is that I just want the monitor to work. It's so fabulous when it's working properly. Amusingly, the monitor has come down in price quite a bit since I bought it, and now Samsung is bringing out
a new revision with a different stand. (Amazon UK; the C24FG73 doesn't appear to have hit the 'States yet.) I wonder if they've resolved the issue that's causing all the problems on this monitor, though? The LC24FG73
seems to use the same panel and everything.
It's not impossible that I could give Samsung another shot, mostly just because this monitor has no competition in the market right now. If I do, though, I'm gonna be buying an extended warranty from the seller with it. There's no way I'm going through this crap again.
