It’s Late March, where’s my G1G1 OLPC Laptop?
One month ago today was the last time I heard anything from OLPC about my laptop, ordered back in December:
Our production schedule is still on track and we expect to deliver your laptop by the middle part to end of March. Your donation is in queue and ready for shipment as soon as we receive additional laptops.
So now it's mid to late March, no laptop and no update. At least my XO's status has been changed to the promising "Your donation is at our warehouse and your laptop is in the process of being shipped." at the laptopgiving website, but no label has been printed, as my FedEx status remains "Not found: No information for the following shipments has been received by our system yet. Please try again later"
Goney3’s G1G1 fulfillment chartsDr. Toast, one of the OLPCNews Forum members scripted queries against the LaptopGiving’s status page with incredible results, estimating ~24,000 unshipped G1G1 laptops, with other G1-got-zero recipients finding that the “late march” dates are turning into “mid april” – and rapidly leaving the “early 2008” promise when we all originally bought the things.
Dr. Toast has kept the script running, even though he's now gotten his XO (lucky bast'd), and posts the updated data daily. He analyzes the various "messages" LaptopGiving responds with like mine, or what I hope to upgrade to soon, "Your donation is ready to be shipped and is in our shipping queue. Please check back with us every few days for updates If you have received this same response after several days (2 weeks or more) please contact Donor Services to verify your shipping info". I just left the long, sad status of "Your donation is ready to be shipped and is in our shipping queue. Unfortunately, we are awaiting new laptop inventory to fulfill your donation. We expect additional inventory to reach our warehouse from the last week in February through the end of March..."
One wonders if their system designed by INFOCOM (of Zork fame?) or the fine folks who made Colossal Cave? The fact that Dr. Toast mapped out the OLPC's Maze of Twisty Little Package Shipping is very impressive; but it'd be nice if this had been transparent from the get-go. Also, there's this thing called customer service, too...