What Happened to IBM Service?

Posted 27 November 2006

I’ve used IBM Thinkpads for a long time. Upon leaving Adobe recently, I had to purchase my own notebook PC for the first time in many years. After asking around, and hearing that there was still no one else that matched IBM’s notebooks for quality (except perhaps Apple), I decided on a Z61t, a widescreen model with an SD card slot and better speakers, but otherwise similar to the T61 (the latest in the T series).

I’m not entirely happy with this machine and now wish I had gone for the T61 instead, but that’s another story. This rant is about IBM’s service.

Although now made by Chinese PC company Lenovo, service in the U.S. is still handled by IBM. My machine came with a keyboard that was loose at one edge and thus made too much noise. After checking the Lenovo site for warranty info, I was redirected to the IBM site to place an “electronic service call” (ESC). The web form required a full mailing address, but the form’s fields didn’t have enough characters for either the name of my street (Occidental Rd.) or my city (Sebastopol). So IBM collected a mailing address that might well not work for actual mail.

The form required an email address, but I never received any email from