This story starts with the release of the Apple iPad, as so many do these days. I saw the iPad and I was completely unexcited. No pen input; limited storage; no general purpose OS; no webcam; in short nothing to make it worth buying. If I wanted an iPod Touch I'd have one. That got me thinking about what else might be out there in the tablet form factor that would suck less.

First I stumbled on the Axiotron Modbook. I'd vaguely hard of this device before, but now I gave it a long hard look. It's a nice tablet in a lot of ways, but it weighs over 5lbs and doesn't have a touchable screen yet. I have a MacBook that I considered converting briefly, but in the end it just isn't a very impressive result with the weak (by today's standards) battery life of my MacBook and lack of touchscreen. Scratch.

Then I saw went poking around Lenovo's site and saw the very nice ThinkPad X200 Tablet. This device was getting much closer to what I'd actually want. Good battery life, especially with the extended battery; touch + Wacom digitizer input; keyboard; full OS, including decent Linux support; optional camera; etc. The problem here comes down to price. A well configured X200T costs about $2000.

Then I found it. I haven't been a huge fan of HP's products in the past, but the HP TouchSmart TM2t is almost perfect. It has everything the X200T has and, with a deal I found, it was available for $1250 including shipping and taxes! I was getting excited about potentially making it a Hackintosh or an awesome Linux tablet. I slept on it and decided I wanted it.

I placed an order on shopping.hp.com, at first getting declined because my credit card's fraud alerts are extra special, then getting my order confirmed. About two hours later, I visited the site to check the status of the order and the most recent order now shows "Declined; Please call". I thought, "Oh, maybe the coupon code I used is no longer valid and it'll cost me an extra $100." I was even willing to shell out the extra. After a few minutes on hold I reached someone who could transfer me to the sales support department and after a few more minutes on hold I spoke to a lady whose name I wish I had made note of.

She verified my billing address and shipping address and name and then told me that my address was a UPS Store and that they couldn't ship to there. I asked why and she said rudely, "company policy". She grilled me about whether I had another address I could ship to, I repeatedly told her that 1) I have a job, 2) my friends have jobs and 3) my company will not accept packages for employees. I asked again why they couldn't ship to the address that I pay for in order to be able to receive valuable packages during the day. She snapped "fraud". I pointed out that they had all of my information and that my billing address was also that address (which they had already authorized against my credit card). Anyhow, I then pointed out that she was about 2 seconds from losing her company a customer and she snapped, "fine". About 10 seconds later she all but hung up on me.

That is how HP lost a customer today; forever.

Edited 5 months, 3 weeks ago: HP called me, laugh
So here I am, casually working and my phone rings. To my complete surprise, it's HP. I started to think, "Hey, maybe they're going to make this right and I'll get a new toy!" Sadly, that was not the case. This CS rep was at least polite about it, but she still lied to me and utterly refused to work with me to get the product that I wanted shipped where I could receive it. She told me that FedEX wouldn't ship to UPS boxes, despite the fact that I've had 100s of packages shipped by FedEX to my UPS boxes over the years. I told her that one of those FedEX packages was my Apple laptop. This time I very explicitly reminded her that I have my billing address at my shipping address to avoid this kind of problem. Still, no budging, tried to convince me that I was somehow wrong for not having another address to receive the package at. Wait, that's why I have the UPS Box! Sorry, HP. Lying politely and utterly refusing to serve your customer is not exactly good customer service.