Last night I decided to upgrade my desktop Mac system, and was going to order a new monitor. I cashed in some of my AMEX Membership Rewards points for a $100 Dell E-certificate. When I tried to buy the monitor, Dell’s website gave me an error, saying that the certificate couldn’t be used. Huh?

So today I call Dell support and naturally, got connected to the Indian call center. At first I figured that things would go nowhere. She took my information, asked me to kindly wait on hold several times, and tried to sell me a Sony Bravia TV, which I don’t need. Later she came back and said that they couldn’t use my E-cert because the product was on sale. Excuse me?

I told her that wasn’t acceptable, and she put me on hold once more. This time she came back and told me that the supervisor can’t take the coupon but as a courtesy they’d take $75 off the price of the monitor. Didn’t I cash in 10,000 points for a $100 E-certificate? I told her that I was going to call AMEX and sort this out. She said she’s keep working on a solution, and would call me within 30 minutes. I figured I’d never hear from her again.

So I call AMEX and told her my story. The woman there starts talking about how it can’t be used for business or refurbished products. I told her that it was neither — I was buying new from Dell Home. She spoke to her supervisor and said that there was nothing they could do, but she would file a report with some high mucky-mucks who might hear my pleas, and refund the money. I told her that nowhere did it say that you cannot use the E-cert on products that are on sale. She sort-of agreed, and said she was adding that to report.

Just then, the call waiting on the phone beeped. I asked if the AMEX rep could hold for a second, and I went back, and was the woman from Dell in India. She said that she was able to get me the $100 discount after all! I switched back to the AMEX woman and told her, had to listen to her ask if I needed an extra AMEX card (no), and then it was back to Dell. I was so happy that it worked out that I let her repeat the same spiel about the Dell credit card for the third time. Things were looking disastrous, but it all worked out in the end.